Group based Publisher-Subscriber Communication Primitives for ndnSIM

Named Data Networking (NDN), an information centric network architecture, aims to provide an efficient and scalable alternative for content distribution. Modern Internet applications have more emphasis on data, and are less concerned about the location from where data is retrieved. NDN's communication primitives being strictly pull based help in bringing this focus shift from location of data to the data itself. A concern for NDN is to enable the support of other popular communication primitives, such as the Publisher-Subscriber (Pub-Sub) model, seamlessly. The Pub-Sub model is well suited for applications that require periodic retrieval of data or event triggered data, such as in Industrial Automation Control Systems (IACS). This paper presents the design and development of a model to support the group based Pub-Sub communication primitives in ndnSIM, a popular ns-3 based network simulator for NDN. The functionality of the proposed model is tested by developing an end-to-end simulation environment in ndnSIM that is representative of the popular use cases of Pub-Sub communication primitives.