Interest packets scheduling and size-based flow control mechanism for content-centric networking web servers

Abstract Content-Centric Networking (CCN) employs a completely different request/response pull communication model of Interest/Content packets and provides the pervasive in-network caching. Although this communication model effectively satisfy most of the popular static Web content requests, it may bring some new challenges for the dynamic Web request services, especially for the time-sensitive dynamic request. We find that the fair scheduling of Interest packets (i.e. without differentiating the new service requests and those requests being processed) will increase the average expected response time, especially when the Web requests with large-size response pages dominate or when the requests fluctuate greatly over time. To improve the performance of CCN Web servers, we present an effective First-Come-First-Served (FCFS) dynamic service requests scheduling scheme specially designed for CCN Web Servers. Furthermore, we also explore the size-based adaptive pipeline flow control approach for CCN Web servers. To validate the proposed approaches, we developed and incorporated these new functions into the existing CCN Web server implementation (named CCNxTomcat), and tested its performance by simulating the workload of three popular dynamic Web sites in a CCN testbed. Experimental results show that the improved CCNxTomcat is more friendly to the dynamic Web requests with large-size response pages and outperforms the existing CCNxTomcat in terms of mean response time in most cases.