Multipath Forwarding Strategies and SDN Control for Named Data Networking

Named Data Networking (NDN) proposes a contentcentric rather than a host-centric approach to data retrieval. Data packets with unique and immutable names are retrieved from a content store (CS) using Interest packets. The current NDN architecture relies on forwarding strategies that are dependent upon on-path caching and is therefore inefficient. This approach reduces data transfer efficiency by ignoring the cached content available on the adjacent off-path routers in the network. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed multipath (D-MP) forwarding strategy and enhancements to the NDN Interest forwarding pipeline. Furthermore, we develop a centralized SDNenabled control for the multipath forwarding strategy (S-MP) that distributes Interests efficiently by using the global knowledge of the NDN network states. We perform extensive evaluations of our proposed methods on an at-scale WAN testbed spanning six geographically separated sites. Our solutions outperform the existing NDN forwarding strategies by a significant margin. We show that the D-MP strategy results in performance gains ranging between 10.4x to 12.5x over the default NDN implementation without in-network caching, and gains of 12.2x to 18.4x with in-network caching. In addition, for the S-MP case, we demonstrate a performance improvement of 10.6x to 12.6x, and 12.9x to 18.5x, for with- and without in-network caching respectively.