Interest ACK: A Fast Packet Loss Detection Mechanism for Content-Centric Networking

Recently, Content-Centric Networking (CCN) has been extensively studied by networking researchers as one of the promising network architectures for realizing information-centric networks. CCN adopts a fundamentally different communication paradigm from that of the conventional Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, advanced transport protocols developed for IP cannot be directly used in CCN. In this paper, we propose a packet loss detection mechanism called Interest ACKnowledgement (ACK). Interest ACKs provides information on the history of successful Interest packet receptions at a repository (i.e., content provider), this information is conveyed to the corresponding entity (i.e., content consumer) via the header of Data packets. Interest ACKs enable the entity to quickly and accurately detect Interest and Data packet losses in the network. We conduct simulations to investigate the effectiveness of Interest ACKs in a rather simple network topology. Our results show that Interest ACKs are effective for improving the adaptability, stability, and fairness of CCN with window-based flow control and that packet losses at the repository can be reduced by 10%–20%.