Delayed Packet Forwarding for Information-Centric Networking

In this paper, we analytically derive the average content delivery delay with delayed packet forwarding in ICN (Information-Centric Networking), which is a mechanism to intentionally delay forwarding of a content request packet (Interest packet) at routers. In ICNs, when a router receives multiple Interest packets requesting the identical content, it can aggregate those Interest packets into a single Interest packet. This makes it possible to reduce the number of Interest packets and Data packets transferred through a network. In this paper, we focus on the delayed packet forwarding that intentionally delays Interest packet forwarding at routers, which aims to increase the aggregation probability at routers. By introducing the delayed packet forwarding to a router, we expect that the aggregation probability is increased, which leads to the reduction in the amount of traffic transfer. In contrast, to intentionally delay packet forwarding at routers might increase content delivery delay between an entity and a repository. In this paper, we therefore derive the average content delivery delay and throughput with and without the delayed packet forwarding in a dumb-bell network topology to quantitatively reveal the effectiveness of delayed packet forwarding. We also investigate the effectiveness of delayed packet forwarding through numerical examples and simulation experiments. Our findings include that, by introduction of delayed packet forwarding, the throughput can be improved by 12% when the output buffer of the repository is small.