QSCCP: A QoS-Aware Congestion Control Protocol for Information-Centric Networking

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a promising future network architecture that shifts the host-based network paradigm to a content-oriented one. Over the past decade, numerous ICN congestion control (CC) schemes have been proposed, tailored to address congestion issues based on ICN’s transmission characteristics. However, several key challenges still need to be addressed. One critical issue is that most existing CC studies for ICN do not consider the diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of modern network applications. This limitation hinders their applicability across various applications with different network performance preferences. Another ongoing challenge lies in improving transmission performance, particularly considering how to appropriately coordinate congestion control participants to enhance content retrieval efficiency and ensure reasonable resource allocation, especially in multipath scenarios. To tackle these challenges, we propose QSCCP, a QoS-aware congestion control protocol built upon NDN (Named Data Networking), a well-known ICN architecture. In QSCCP, diverse QoS preferences of various traffic are supported within a collaborative congestion control framework. A novel multi-level, class-based scheduling and forwarding mechanism is designed to ensure varied and fine-grained QoS guarantees. A distributed congestion notification and precise feedback mechanism is also provided, which efficiently collaborates with an adaptive multipath forwarding strategy and consumer rate adjustment to rationally allocate network resources and improve transmission efficiency, particularly in multipath scenarios. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that QSCCP satisfies diverse QoS requirements while achieving outstanding transmission performance. It outperforms existing schemes in throughput, fairness, delay, and packet loss, with a rapid convergence rate and excellent stability.