As a promising candidate for future Internet architecture, Named Data Networking (NDN) can achieve significant potential advantages over current TCP/IP based Internet in content distribution and mobility support, etc. However, the communication mode in NDN that one Interest packet for pulling one data packet is likely to incur Interest packets flooding and to cause extremely large-scale Pending Interest Table (PIT) of the NDN router, which may substantially degrade the performance of NDN. Moreover, the absence of predefined connections also induces another challenge for NDN to manage the successive and concurrent requests from consumers efficiently. In this paper, we propose flow-based NDN (f-NDN) architecture capable of supporting flow transmission mode for addressing the aforementioned challenges. In the context of f-NDN, a data flow is defined as an aggregate of data packets with the same name prefix, and a flow Interest packet is introduced to pull a data flow rather than a single data packet. The PIT, CS, and FIB are re-designed to enable f-NDN to operate at the granularity of flows. Bitmap structure aided error handling mechanism is further presented for f-NDN to deal with the flow transmission's uncertain failures. The built-in flow support in f-NDN allows us to conceive a flow-level multi-path transmission regime for balancing the traffic in NDN network and reducing the time consumed for pulling the entire content. Weight-based flow Interest splitting algorithm and optimal rate control algorithm are both proposed for optimizing multi-path transmission. We illustrate the capability of the proposed architecture in supporting flow transmission and multipath by implementing it in both simulator and prototype systems. The evaluation results are also presented to show its achievable performance.

Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture promises significant advantages over current Internet architecture by replacing its host-centric design with a content-centric one. In NDN, the mode that one Interest packet gets one Data packet can quite easily lead to Interest flooding and a huge number of the related entries. Moreover, the absence of predefined connections is a challenge for NDN to efficiently manage the successive requests from consumers or the innetwork concurrent requests. In this paper, we argue that it is necessary for NDN to support flow transmission mechanism aimed at improving transmission performance, and based on it we design flow-based NDN (f-NDN) architecture which can not only achieve overload decreasing by packing successive Interest packets but also performance improvement and load-balance by multi-path. Simulation of our architecture is carried out in different network scenarios to evaluate the performance of our architecture. Evaluation results show that the proposed architecture operates better than NDN architecture in many aspects such as transmission efficiency and system load including reducing the number of Interest packets and lookup operations performed on the related tables in routers.