Modeling multipath forwarding strategies in Information Centric Networks

A content can be replicated in more than one node in Information Centric Networks (ICNs). Thus, more than one path can be followed to reach the same content, and it is necessary to decide the interface(s) to be selected in every network node to forward content requests towards such multiple content containers. A multipath forwarding strategy defines how to perform this choice. We propose a general analytical model to evaluate the effect of multipath forwarding strategies on the performance of an ICN content delivery, whose congestion control follows a receiver driven, path-unaware, loss-based AIMD scheme. We use the model to understand the behavior of ICN multipath forwarding strategies proposed in the literature so far, and to devise and evaluate a novel strategy.