Towards the NFVI-Assisted ICN: Integrating ICN Forwarding into the Virtualization Infrastructure

Information-centric networking (ICN) can bring many benefits to network operators, e.g., in-network request resolution via router's cache, and name-based forwarding. However, creating a smooth migration path from the current IP network to the ICN is a challenging task that must be investigated. Network function virtualization (NFV) is one of the key technologies to achieve this migration because of its flexibility in supporting new network services as software. Nevertheless, when we consider the deployment of ICN services over NFV, two performance issues are found: processing delay of name look-up and computational overhead of the virtual machine. In this paper we propose NFV infrastructure-assisted name-based forwarding by integrating the name look-up into the Open vSwitch. The contributions are twofold: 1) First, we provide a novel look-up scheme that can forward ICN packets without costly longest prefix match searching. 2) Second, we integrate this forwarding scheme into the virtualization infrastructure to mitigate computational overhead.