Implementation and Evaluation of NetInf TP, an Information-centric Transport Protocol

Sammanfattning: In recent times, there has been a significant growth in the number of Internet users, resulting in an increased demand for different types and amounts of content. As content distribution over the Internet has become a key issue, one proposal is that the Internet architecture could evolve to a more ``Information-Centric'' paradigm instead of the currently designed ``Host-Centric'' paradigm. In the host-based architecture, the data is often restricted to a location and will become unavailable if the host holding the data (or network connection) becomes unreachable. With the Information-centric data approach, the requestor requests data and receives it regardless of where the data actually originated from. Hence, the focus moves from ``where'' to ``what'' one is interested in. The heterogeneity of access methods and devices makes this type of approach even more appealing, especially when caching of data at intermediate points can be achieved. The prototype developed in the thesis builds an important part of the Information-Centric vision, that is a receiver-driven transport protocol. This is in contrast to the host-centric transport protocols which are always source driven. The advantage of having the receiver driven feature is to allow for multiple senders or receivers of the same data. That is, one receiver may ask more than one holder to send different pieces of the same file. We have implemented, simulated and assessed the performance of the proposed protocol, hereby called NetInf TP. Since the protocol may have to co-exist with existing sender driven TCP implementations for some time, we have looked at the inter-operation of NetInf TP with TCP variants from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives.