Reality Check of CCN Routing Using Search Processor

Content Centric Network (CCN), a typical incarnation of the Information Centric Network (ICN), which is an active research topic of Future Internet Architecture. Naming the content's chunks, retrieving and forwarding the content chunks according to their names are the core ideas of CCN. But the length of the content's name is variable length, which is an obvious difference from the IP address in the IP network. Also the space of the content names is much bigger than IP addresses. It is a big challenge for CCN routing based on name search in FIB table. FIB table lookup based on software solution incurs high latency, which is unsuitable for high speed network while the network needs to forward CCN packets in wire-speed. In this paper, FIB table lookup for CCN routing based on hardware search processor is explored as what can be used as fast TCAM with high performance and low power consumption. And the characteristics of the search processor are introduced and the reason why it is suitable for FIB lookup in CCN routing is also explained based on some evaluations. Some experiments are conducted to compare the software-based solution with our hardware-based solution on the performance. And the power consumption and the cost are also analyzed. Finally, according to the evaluation results, the conclusion can be reached that FIB table lookup based on search processor in CCN routing is practical with power efficiency.