A reliable multicast transport protocol for information-centric networks

In the past few years, many researchers have argued that the Internet should transit from its traditional endpoint-centric architecture to an information-centric paradigm. One of the advantages of the information-centric model is that the network can easily aggregate requests for the same content and serve them via multicast. Indeed, most information-centric architectures proposed to date offer native support for multicast, promising a vast improvement in the efficiency of content distribution. However, designing efficient reliable transport protocols for multicast is a largely open issue, due to the problem of feedback implosion towards the sender as group size grows. In this paper we propose RMTPSI, a retransmission-based reliable error control protocol for multicast communication designed specifically for information-centric networks. We compare RMTPSI with existing approaches proposed for IP multicast and evaluate its performance via simulation, showing that our approach leads to more efficient content distribution and error recovery than previous solutions.