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

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.