Elastic Gigabit NDN Forwarder for Big Data Applications

Abstract

Information Centric Networking is more and moreused today. Named Data Networking (NDN) is one imple-mentation of such paradigm focusing the communication onthe information instead of the hosts. The performance of the NDN forwarder - called Name Forwarder Daemon (NFD) - is one major challenge faced by the NDN community especiallydue to the complex structures of both the naming prefixes and the forwarding tables. High-performance NFD is a majorrequirement to enable Big Data processing over NDN due to thescale of the exchanges used in real life applications. This paperproposes an approach to overcome the actual limitation of thepackets processing capability of the NFD. The proposed approachuses state-of-the-art virtualization techniques to distribute theprocessing among several NFD instances to build an elastic NFD.The proposed forwarder architecture challenges the status quo in term of applicability of NFD for high-speed Big Data transfers that we demonstrate with experiments using our proof-of-conceptimplementation.