Investigating Route Cache in Named Data Networking

Named data networking is a new communication paradigm for the future networking architecture, which shifts the networking from a host-oriented architecture to an information-centric one. Its data transmission is realized via name-based routing and forwarding. This, however, brings severe challenges to the scalability of the forwarding information base (FIB) because the name space is infinite and can be several orders of magnitude larger than the IP counterpart. This letter tries to mitigate the FIB explosion problem and achieve high-speed forwarding by adding route cache to the FIB design. We proposed two approaches to tackle the cache hiding problem rooted from the longest prefix matching on names of arbitrary length: the atomic caching that groups multiple overlapping prefixes as a unit for cache operation, and the on-the-fly caching that caches only the most specific prefixes. Trace-driven simulation using an HTTP request trace from China Mobile demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of our design.