The lack of application support is probably the biggest obstacle to ICN/NDN deployment. One approach to tackle this problem is to NDNize existing applications by translating between application-level protocols and NDN, which can benefit from NDN's architectural advantages while minimizing development efforts needed. In this paper, we validate the effectiveness of this approach by applying it to Internet livestreaming, and develop PCLive , a livestreaming system with NDN embedded as its distribution network. PCLive makes minimal changes to an Internet livestreaming architecture, achieving the maximum compatibility with existing components including video players, OBS, and video transcoders. By solving a number of design issues such as HLS/NDN protocol translation, data translation, naming and security, PCLive is able to run over an NDN network and enjoy its architectural benefits. Since December 2021, PCLive has been running on an NDN testbed consisting of cloud servers from seven cities. It can serve almost four times as many clients as an existing livestreaming system can over IP under the same network conditions; at the same time, the average throughput of the bottleneck link in the NDN testbed is 34.8% lower than that in IP. We also evaluate congestion control and adaptive forwarding with PCLive.
Benchmarking Named Data Networking (NDN)/Content Centric Networking (CCN) forwarders is becoming an important task as the demand for fast forwarding is becoming inevitable for their dissemination. Many full-fledged software-based forwarders have been implemented with a throughput of 100 Gbps, and recently, prototypes of some hardware-based forwarders using a P4 switch have been implemented with a throughput of more than 1 Tbps. Many studies have placed stress on NDN forwarders with uniform request patterns. However, these request patterns enable only the maximum throughput to be measured. In contrast, this study addresses the generation of non-uniform request patterns at a rate of Tbps to evaluate the throughput of NDN forwarders.
Programmable switches provide a solution for implementing highspeed Named Data Networking (NDN) forwarding. However, the challenge arises from the packets in the NDN network that carry hierarchical names of varying lengths, coupled with the inherent limitation of programmable switches in parsing variable-length packet content and storing large NDN forwarding tables. To address this issue, we propose Pegasus, an NDN router framework that combines the programmable switch with commodity servers to realize the high speed and reliability of NDN packet forwarding. The main idea is to maximize the involvement of the programmable switch in NDN packet handling by designing a parser that supports variable-length names and a Pending Interest Table (PIT) for fast forwarding. We implement a multi-core parallel software forwarder on servers to serve as the backend router to efficiently process packets that the switch cannot handle. Experimental results show that Pegasus can process NDN names with diverse lengths at the maximum throughput of 780 Gbps in our testbed.
Inter-domain routing (IDR), in which autonomous systems (ASes) co-operate to exchange information so that packets can be forwarded to their intended destinations, is a crucial component of any global network service. IDR in today's Internet is already challenging because of the need to accommodate each AS's route selection policies. Policies are determined by business (i.e., generating revenue or increasing costs for the AS), performance, and reliability considerations. IDR for information-centric networking (ICN) services is further complicated by the scale and topology-independence of the data namespace. On the other hand, ICN approaches that offer built-in origin authenticity and integrity have potential to overcome some of the issues with the current Border Gateway Protocol-based legacy IDR system, which was originally deployed without security mechanisms. In this paper, we survey a set of representative IDR solutions for information-centric networking proposed in the literature. We describe key design aspects of such systems, and characterize the surveyed systems in terms of those aspects. We point out tradeoffs involved in minimizing network resources wasted on delivery of data that the application will consider bogus; this is important at the inter-domain level, where transit service involves compensation between ASes. Finally, we discuss the issue of trust, and identify potential research directions for IDR in the context of ICN.
Information-centric networking (ICN) is a prominent architecture that realizes content-aware network services through name-based communications. A programmable ICN router implemented on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) accelerator can achieve predictable performance for advanced service requirements, such as low latency and high throughput. However, owing to the tight resource constraints, implementing ICN functions on an FPGA is a huge challenge, as ICN requires frequent update tables for maintaining long and variable-length content names and access to caching devices capable of storing large-volume content. In this study, we designed and implemented an FPGA router that incorporates an ICN by applying the CCNx v1.0 protocol specification. The FPGA router implemented a unified status table on a large-capacity DRAM that stored 10 million variable-length content name prefixes. Additionally, we introduced a DRAM bank allocation that is unaffected by slow random accesses and reduces table access latency, and a Row-Bank-Column memory address mapping scheme that reduces the access time to heavily loaded in-network cache storage. We present the evaluation results of the proposed architecture implemented on the NetFPGA-SUME board, revealing 10 Gbps or 2.8 Mpps throughput and ≤ 300 ns jitter.
