Named Data Networking with Programmable Switches

Abstract

The Internet today is mainly used for distributing content, in a fundamental departure from its original goal of enabling communication between endpoints. As a response to this change, Named Data Networking (NDN) is a new architecture rooted on the concept of naming data, in contrast to the original paradigm based on naming hosts. This radical architectural shift results in packet processing in NDN to differ substantially from IP. As a consequence, current network equipment cannot be seamlessly extended to offer NDN data-plane functions. To address this challenge, available NDN router solutions are usually software-based, and even the highly-optimised designs tailored to specific hardware platforms present limited performance, hindering adoption. In addition, these tailor-made solutions are hardly reusable in research and production networks. The emergence of programmable switching chips and of languages to program them, like P4, brings hope for the state of affairs to change. In this paper, we present the design of an NDN router written in P4. We improve over the state-of-the-art solution by extending the NDN functionality, and by addressing its scalability limitations. A preliminary evaluation of our open-source solution running on a software target demonstrates its feasibility.