Scalable Naming in ICN

Information-centric networking (ICN) is attracting attention as a new network technology that can replace current networks. However, in ICN, the size of the forwarding information base (FIB) of routers seriously increases. To dramatically reduce the FIB size, in this paper, we propose adding AS and router names to the content name as a prefix for forwarding packets at routers. When content providers, i.e., publishers, do not move, the proposed method can reduce the FIB size to about 1/10,000. However, we cannot forward packets to publishers when publishers move to other locations. To solve this, we also propose two approaches: router-name-based redirect forwarding (RNRF) and router-name-based direct forwarding (RNDF). In a numerical evaluation done using the measured locations of web objects, we show that the effect of reducing the FIB size is maintained, although the hop length increases linearly as the movement ratio of publishers increases with RNRF. In comparison, with RNDF, we can maintain the hop length, although the FIB size increases linearly as the movement ratio of publishers increases.