On-Demand Routing for Scalable Name-Based Forwarding

Abstract

Information-centric Networking (ICN) is a future Internet architecture design, where application-level names are directly used to route interests to fetch a copy of the desired content/data from any location. Following the conventions of the Internet Protocol to store the pre-computed routing/forwarding state for all prefixes at the network nodes raises scalability concerns in ICN (where content name prefixes need to be stored), especially at the inter-domain level. Instead, we consider the other extreme; that is, On-Demand Routing (ODR) computation for content name prefixes as interests arrive. ODR makes use of domain-level, per-prefix routing instructions usable by all the forwarders in a domain, named Routing Information Objects (RIO). Forwarders discover and retrieve RIOs in a similar way as content and can be cached in a new data structure called Route Information Store (RIS). RIOs are handed to a routing strategy module to perform a routing decision before relaying the packets. We demonstrate through extensive simulations that ODR scales the storage of routing/forwarding information through caching and information discovery-two mechanisms inherent to the ICN design. We propose our design as an extension of the Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture and discuss all the proposed enhancements in detail