Hybrid ICN Scalable On-demand Routing

Research topics Scalable Routing | Information-centric Networks (ICN) | Software Defined Networks (SDN) 

Description

Hybrid Information-centric Networking (hICN) can achieve similar scalability properties with Internet Protocol (IP) at the inter-domain level. However, routing of Interest packets within a domain requires awareness of which hICN network addresses are leased to which hosts. This presents a potential scalability issue, because domains may lease a very large number of hICN name prefixes at distributed locations. With a limited size Forwarding Information Base (FIB) in the routers/forwarders, it is challenging to perform intra-domain routing of Interests to a host that has a replica of the requested content within the domain.

We propose that hICN forwarders store routing information associated with location-independent hICN prefixes in a cache managed in a least-recently used manner. In case of the absence of an entry for Interest forwarding, the forwarder will perform an on-demand routing computation to obtain the entry by using routing information in the cache. If cache information for a prefix is not available, the forwarder will then pull the information for that prefix from a logically centralized Routing Server. This approach can provide high scalability for hICN routing. We aim to research on the scalability properties this this solution and subsequently build a complete prototype of this on-demand routing mechanism by extending the existing codebase of Hybrid ICN.