Leveraging ICN In-network Control for Loss Detection and Recovery in Wireless Mobile networks

One of the most appealing features of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is its agile connectionless transport model based on consumer requests and hop-by-hop forwarding. By relaxing end-to-end constraints, ICN empowers a distributed in-network control with the potential to improve congestion management over heterogeneous wired/wireless media and in presence of mobility. However, little effort has been devoted so far to the exploration of ICN capabilities in this space. In this paper, we contribute an understanding of the opportunities for ICN in-network control over wireless mobile networks and a proposal for simple, yet very effective mechanisms for in-network loss detection and recovery to complement receiver-driven control. More precisely, we introduce (i) WLDR, a mechanism for in-network Wireless Loss Detection and Recovery that promptly identifies and recovers channel losses at wireless access point and (ii) MLDR, a mechanism for preventing losses due to consumer/producer mobility via explicit network notification and dynamic on-the-fly request re-routing. We setup a realistic wireless simulation environment in ndn-SIM using IEEE 802.11n connectivity and evaluate WLDR-MLDR performance. The results show significant benefits over consumer-based solutions with or without explicit loss notification, while also removing any dependency from network and application timers.