Packet Forwarding in Named Data Networking Requirements and Survey of Solutions

Named Data Networking (NDN) is the most promising paradigm recently conceived for future Internet architectures, where communications are driven by content instead of host addresses. To realize this novel paradigm, three novel tables, namely Content Store, Pending Interest Table, and Forwarding Information Base, are utilized in NDN forwarding plane. Designing and evaluating the quick enough forwarding plane with high capacity is a major challenge within the overall NDN research area. Since NDN was proposed in 2010, there have been many efforts focusing on this challenge and a rich literature has been developed. Unfortunately, there is a lack of the comprehensive sketch about the requirements of NDN forwarding plane and the study on various schemes proposed. Focusing on the above insufficiency, this survey gives the complete requirements and compares all the schemes proposed for NDN forwarding plane based on the data structure utilized. In addition, the survey also discusses some issues, challenges, and directions in future research. It is considered that designing a novel data structure to meet all requirements of the forwarding plane and studying on a better structure of content store play important roles, while discussing the necessity of a unified index, combining with other contents in NDN research and implementing a unified benchmark are also required in this domain.