An Entropy-Based Approach: Compressing Names for NDN Lookup

NDN (Named Data Networking) is one of the most popular future network architecture, a “clean slate” design for replacing the traditional TCP/IP network. However, the lookup algorithm of FIB entry in NDN is the bottleneck of the current NDN. Owing to the unique identifier of content name, whose length is variable, the size of FIB entries is proliferating, and the effectiveness of lookup algorithms is low. This paper proposed an entropy-oriented name processing mechanism, compressing the content names effectively by bringing in an encoding scheme. This mechanism can be split into two parts: name compression and lookup. The first part compressed the content names and converted them into a kind of code with a smaller size by considering the information redundancies of content names; the second part built a compact structure to minimize the memory footprint of FIB entries with keeping the high lookup performance. This mechanism outperformed many traditional name lookup algorithms, had better flexibility and cost less memory footprint.