Toward fast NDN software forwarding lookup engine based on hash tables

In Named Data Networking (NDN), forwarding lookup is based on tokenized variable-length names instead of fixed-length host addresses, and therefore it requires a new approach for designing a fast packet forwarding lookup engine. In this paper, we propose a design of an NDN software forwarding lookup engine based on hash tables and evaluate its performance with different design options. With a good hash function and table design combined with Bloom filters and data prefetching, we demonstrate that our design reaches about 1.5MPPS with a single thread on an Intel 2.0GHz Xeon processor.