On the aggregation of FIBs at ICN routers using routing strategy

Abstract

Utilizing in-network caching is essential for the current communication network. In the last decade, ICN (Information-Centric Networking) has been under the spotlight as a network that mainly focuses on transmitted and received data rather than on hosts that transmit and receive data. In ICNs, to appropriately forward request packets, a router maintains a routing table called FIB (Forwarding Information Base). However, it is unsuitable for us to assume that FIB can store entries of all contents within a network. This is mainly because the FIB memory is not large enough to store the prefix of all contents. Thus, for realizing global-scale ICNs, it is crucial to develop an effective technique to reduce the size of FIB. In this paper, to tackle the reduction in the FIB size with the aggregation, we propose a routing strategy called constrained shortest-path tree (CSPT) routing. The fundamental idea of our CSPT routing is to combine shortest-paths on the network and that on a shortest-path tree of the network, which is intended to enhance the effect of FIB aggregation. Furthermore, we extensively investigate the relationship, i.e., trade-off, between the FIB aggregation and the communication performance of ICN using CSPT routing. Consequently, we reveal that our CSPT routing can dramatically reduce the number of FIB entries while suppressing the increase in the number of hops required to deliver request packets.