Two-level Named Packet Forwarding for Enhancing the Performance of Virtualized ICN Router

Abstract

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) can offer rich functionalities to the network, e.g, in-network caching, and name-based forwarding. Incremental deployment of ICN is a key challenge that enable smooth migration from current IP network to ICN. We can say that Network Function Virtualization (NFV) must be one of the key technologies to achieve this deployment because of its flexibility to support new network functions. However, when we consider the ICN deployment with NFV, there exist two performance issues, processing delay of name-based forwarding and computational overhead of virtual machine. In this paper we proposed a NFV infrastructure-assisted ICN packet forwarding by integrating the name look-up to the Open vSwitch. The contributions are twofold: 1) First, we provide the novel name look-up scheme that can forward ICN packets without costly longest prefix match searching. 2) Second, we design the ICN packet forwarding scheme that integrates the partial name look-up into the virtualization infrastructure to mitigate computation overhead.