Are MIRCC and Rate-based Congestion Control in ICN READY for Variable Link Capacity?

Information-centric networking (ICN) has been introduced as a potential future networking architecture. ICN promises an architecture that makes information independent from lo- cation, application, storage, and transportation. Still, it is not without challenges. Notably, there are several outstanding issues regarding congestion control: Since ICN is more or less oblivious to the location of information, it opens up for a single application flow to have several sources, something which blurs the notion of transport flows, and makes it very difficult to employ traditional end-to-end congestion control schemes in these networks. Instead, ICN networks often make use of hop-by-hop congestion control schemes. How- ever, these schemes are also tainted with problems, e.g., several of the proposed ICN congestion controls assume fixed link capacities that are known beforehand. Since this seldom is the case, this paper evaluates the consequences in terms of latency, throughput, and link usage, variable link capacities have on a hop-by-hop congestion control scheme, such as the one employed by the Multipath-aware ICN Rate-based Congestion Control (MIRCC). The evaluation was carried out in the OMNeT++ simulator, and demonstrates how seemingly small variations in link capacity significantly deterio- rate both latency and throughput, and often result in inefficient network link usage. Research Environment for Advancing Low Latency Internet (READY