SmartFIB: Low-Replacement Route Storage for Large Name Space Forwarding

We revisit route caching in information-centric networking and propose SmartFIB, a tandem route storage design for dealing with the name forwarding table scalability problem. The proposed route storage not only can quickly adapt to traffic pattern to retain the most frequently referred name prefixes but also is hardware-friendly thanks to its exceptionally low replacement rate. The low replacement, moreover, reduces route lookup rates in settings where centralized name resolution service or scoped route discovery is deployed. Our scheme is lightweight, can enhance route hit rate of small-size fast-memory forwarding information base (FIB), and most remarkably is able to reduce route replacement multiple folds. Evaluated in real-topology networks under a wide variety of parameter settings, the proposed route storage can increase hit rate by 27% compared with a conventional route cache especially with a tiny FIB size, four orders of magnitude smaller than the name prefix space, and more importantly, it can lower route replacement more than 7 times. The results suggest that our proposed scheme is a viable technique to complement route caching in dealing with the name forwarding table scalability problem.