Accelerating File Downloads in Publish Subscribe Internetworking with Multisource and Multipath Transfers

Abstract:
We present mmFTP, a file transfer protocol for the Publish Subscribe Internetworking (PSI) architecture, which follows the Information-Centric Network (ICN) paradigm. mmFTP is designed to utilize diverse in-network resources: (i) it is receiver-driven, thus supporting on-path caching, (ii) it downloads files from multiple sources, thus utilizing off-path caching and (iii) it offers multipath transfers, thus exploiting path diversity and assisting network load-balancing. mmFTP combines these features into a single framework without complicating network operation. This is achieved by exploiting the functional organization of the PSI architecture which – among other aspects – separates routing from packet forwarding, delegates routing control to a logically centralized module and employs an explicit routing scheme for packet forwarding. In this paper we introduce the basic operation of mmFTP and present preliminary experimental performance results from a prototype implementation deployed in the PlanetLab testbed.