On Sharing an FIB Table in Named Data Networking

Abstract

As a new networking paradigm, Named Data Networking (NDN) technology focuses on contents, and content names are used as identifiers for forwarding and routing, as opposed to IP addresses in the current Internet. NDN routers forward packets by looking up a Forwarding Information Base (FIB), each entry of which has a name prefix and output faces. An FIB should have the information to forward Interest packets for any contents. Hence, the size of an FIB would be excessively large in NDN routers, and the traffic for building an FIB would be significant. In order to reduce the traffic associated with building an FIB table and memory requirement for storing an FIB table, this paper proposes a new efficient method which combines the routing of network connectivity and the building of a forwarding engine using Bloom filters. We propose to share the summary of an FIB using a Bloom filter rather than to advertise each name prefix. The forwarding engine of the proposed scheme is a combination of Bloom filters, and hence the memory requirement of the forwarding can be much smaller than the regular FIB. Simulation results using ndnSIM under real network topologies show that the proposed method can achieve nearly the same performance as the conventional link state algorithm with 6-8% of the traffic for distributing the connectivity information and 5-9% of the memory consumption.