Named data networking on a router: forwarding at 20gbps and beyond

Named data networking (NDN) is a new networking paradigm using named data instead of named hosts for communication. Implementation of scalable NDN packet forwarding remains a challenge because NDN requires fast variable-length hierarchical name-based lookup, per-packet data plane state update, and large-scale forwarding tables. We have designed and implemented an NDN data plane with a software forwarding engine on an Intel Xeon-based line card in a Cisco ASR9000 router. In order to achieve high-speed forwarding, our design features (1) name lookup via hash tables with fast collision-resistant hash computation, (2) an efficient and secure FIB lookup algorithm that provides good average and bounded worst-case FIB lookup time, (3) PIT partitioning that enables linear multi-core speedup, and (4) an optimized data structure and software prefetching to maximize data cache utilization. In this demonstration, we showcase our NDN router implementation on the ASR9000 and demonstrate that it can forward real NDN traffic at 20Gbps or higher.