[Ndn-interest] NDN Load Balancing and Alternative Path

[GTS]

My $.02:

On 4/24/17 7:58 PM, Junxiao Shi wrote:
> Hi Boubakr
>
> Yes, load balancing and usage of alternate paths apply to Interest 
> forwarding only, while Data simply follows the reverse of an Interest. 
> There is no "consumer address" in the Data, so that there is no way to 
> send the Data on another path.
> The consumer is ultimately responsible for retrieving the Data it 
> wants. If there is a link failure, the downstream (consumer or 
> otherwise) can retransmit the Interest, in order to reach a node that 
> has the Data (either producer or cache). It is also downstream's 
> responsibility to load balance its Interests among multiple paths, in 
> reaction to congestion marks.

> You may have seen schemes that add a return address to Data packets. 
> Such schemes would not work with Interest aggregation: if the Data is 
> routed via an alternate path according to the return address, other 
> consumers whose Interests have been aggregated could not receive the 
> Data because the Data no longer passes through the node that performed 
> the aggregation.
That's correct.
Some of these schemes do not use the PIT at all, e.g., 
https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.07755 (to appear at IEEE ICCCN 2017).
No surprise then that "no PIT entry" implies "no interest aggregation".

IMHO, interest aggregation is a very appealing feature, in principle. 
However, I wonder if there is any solid (for some definition
of "solid") published evidence of interest aggregation occurring with 
non-negligible frequency under realistic traffic
scenarios and thus saving bandwidth, reducing latency, etc, etc.


Cheers,
Gene Tsudik