Network Codes-Based Multi-Source Transmis- Sion Control Protocol For Information -Centric Networks

With the rapid shift from end-to-end communications to content-based data retrieval, there are increasing interests in exploiting Information-centric net-works (ICN) to deliver data. As the special characteristics of ICN, in-network caching and naming-based routing make traditional TCP-like transmission con-trol protocol unsuitable. Although there are some existing efforts on improving the congestion control in ICN, the big issue of redundant transmissions caused by multiple sources has received little attention.To eliminate the redundancy and speed up the transmission, we propose a Network Codes-based Multi-Source Transmission Control Protocol (NC-MS), which provides an efficient and controllable multi-source content retrieval ser-vice over ICN. NC-MS takes advantage of random network coding to make full use of the coded data responded by different sources to speed up decoding thus data receiving at the request side. Moreover, we design a scheduling algorithm based on a simple Expected Reception Deadline (ERD) to efficiently control the number of coded packets to send at each source. This not only effectively elimi-nates the redundant transmissions in ICN, but also helps to further speed up the information retrieval. In order to address the issue due to the dynamic network conditions and prediction error, we introduce a compensation algorithm. Exten-sive simulations show that our mechanism greatly reduces the redundancy while speeding up the content retrievals by the network users.