Transport Information Collection Protocol with clustering of information sources

We improve and validate TICP, our TCP-friendly reliable transport protocol to collect information from a large number of sources spread over the Internet [1]. A collector machine sends probes to information sources that reply by sending back report packets containing their information. TICP adapts the probing rate in a way to avoid implosion at the collector and network congestion. Lost packets are requested again by TICP until they are correctly received. In this work, we add to TICP a mechanism to cluster information sources in order to probe sources behind the same bottleneck together. This ensures a smooth variation of network conditions during the collection session and hence an efficient handling of congestion at the network bottlenecks. This mechanism is based upon the Global Network Positioning (GNP) Internet coordinate system. By running simulations in ns-2 over realistic network topologies, we prove that TICP with clustering of information sources has shorter collection session duration and causes less packet losses in the network than the initial version that probes sources independently of their locations