Current Internet performs traffic engineering (TE) by estimating traffic
matrices on a regular schedule, and allocating flows based upon weights
computed from these matrices. This means the allocation is based upon a guess
of the traffic in the network based on its history. Information-Centric
Networks on the other hand provide a finer-grained description of the traffic:
a content between a client and a server is uniquely identified by its name, and
the network can therefore learn the size of different content items, and
perform traffic engineering and resource allocation accordingly. We claim that
Information-Centric Networks can therefore provide a better handle to perform
traffic engineering, resulting in significant performance gain.
We present a mechanism to perform such resource allocation. We see that our
traffic engineering method only requires knowledge of the flow size (which, in
ICN, can be learned from previous data transfers) and outperforms a min-MLU
allocation in terms of response time. We also see that our method identifies
the traffic allocation patterns similar to that of min-MLU without having
access to the traffic matrix ahead of time. We show a very significant gain in
response time where min MLU is almost 50% slower than our ICN-based TE method
