On the Forwarding Information Base Sizing in Named Data Networking of Things

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a new network architecture derived from the success of the Internet. Specifically, NDN addresses and identifies data by naming. Source and destination host addresses are not required for data communication in the NDN because the data is uniquely named instead. In the NDN network, the Forwarding Information Base (FIB) table is responsible for data forwarding, the Pending Interest Table (PIT) is liable for holding the state of data forwarding process, and the Content Store (CS) is used to stock data chunks within the network to optimize the forwarding time to the data without contacting to the content producer. All these data structures consume the memory of devices existing in the Named Data Networking of Things (NDNoT). Accordingly, the size of the FIB, PIT and CS needs to be carefully adjusted in NDNoT environments for performance tuning and Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning. In this study, we explore the issues of FIB sizing on average and maximum occupancy, reliability and maximum delay for constant bit rate (CBR) traffic where each content producer is addressed with a prefix name in the Cooja simulator environment. The results indicate that FIB table size has an impact on the reliability and maximum delay. During the number of records in FIB outpaces the count of nodes in the network, the reliability decreases gradually. Therefore, in constrained NDNoT environment careful allocation of the memory among FIB, PIT and CS becomes an important issue. According to our knowledge so far, this work is the first study showing the effect of FIB table on the performance in an NDNoT environment.