An Efficient NDN Routing Mechanism Design in P4 Environment

Name Data Networking (NDN) is a clean-slate network redesign that uses content names for routing and addressing. Facing the fact that TCP/IP is deeply entrenched in the current Internet architecture, NDN has made slow progress in industrial promotion. Meanwhile, new architectures represented by SDN, P4, etc., provide a flexible and programmable approach to network research. As a result, a centralized NDN routing mechanism is needed in the scenario for network integration between NDN and TCP/IP. Combining the NLSR protocol and the P4 environment, we introduce an efficient NDN routing mechanism that offers extensible NDN routing services (e.g., resources-location management and routing calculation) which can be programmed in the control plane. More precisely, the proposed mechanism allows the programmable switches to transmit NLSR packets to the control plane with the extended data plane. The NDN routing services are provided by control plane application which framework bases on resource-location mapping to achieve part of the NLSR mechanism. Experimental results show that the proposed mechanism can reduce the number of routing packets significantly, and introduce a slight overhead in the controller compared with NLSR simulation.