A new name prefix trie with path compression

Abstract

As one of promising future Internet architectures, named data networking (NDN) technology has been widely researched in these days. As a basic name lookup structure used in NDN routers, a name prefix trie (NPT) is an extended version of a binary trie used for IP address lookup. However, since name prefixes can have an unbounded number of components, an NPT can have many empty nodes which cause memory wastes as well as low lookup performance. In this paper, we propose a pathcompressed NPT (PC-NPT) to reduce the memory requirement and improve the search performance. Simulations using real URL data sets show that the proposed structure removes up to 97% of empty nodes and improves approximately 21% in the search performance. © 2016 IEEE.