Reliable Efficient Network for Communication and Access for Wireless NDN in Edge Environments
Yaodong Huang, Jiahui Luo, Changkang Mo, Laizhong Cui · 2025
Wireless networks are pivotal to modern communication, yet traditional address-centric protocols often fail to leverage the inherent advantages of wireless transmission potentials in dynamic edge environments. While Information-centric Networking (ICN) offers promising data-centric alternatives, the integration with wireless systems in resource-constrained edge settings faces critical challenges including channel instability, unreliable transmission, and fluctuating link quality. This paper introduces RENCA, a framework designed to enable seamless NDN-based wireless communication tailored for edge environments. RENCA addresses these challenges through three key innovations. First, it introduces a distributed collision avoidance strategy that leverages wireless broadcast properties to select high-quality communication pairs in real time, minimizing localized interference in wireless networks. Second, it incorporates a reliable transmission mechanism using Selective Negative Acknowledgement (SNAK) to ensure data integrity while aligning with content-centric principles in dynamic edge topologies. Third, it presents a dynamic Modulation Coding Scheme (MCS) adaptation that improves communication goodput in response to real-time channel fluctuations. We implement the entire RENCA protocol stack on real wireless hardware and drivers, and conduct extensive experiments over real wireless scenarios. The system achieves a 92.96% overall goodput improvement in multi-device edge environments compared to traditional protocols, demonstrating the usefulness of robust, high-performance communication for edge applications.