A greedy ant colony forwarding algorithm for Named Data Networking

Abstract

The Named Data Networking (NDN) is a newly proposed Internet architecture based on Content-Centric Networking, which transforms data, instead of hosts, into a first-class entity. However, one of the major challenges is supporting intelligent forwarding of Interests over multiple paths while allowing an unbounded name space. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a Greedy Ant Colony Forwarding (GACF) algorithm which uses the ISP-based aggregation to reduce the content naming space. There are two kinds of ants in GACF. One is Hello Ant which is used to discover the all possible paths and optimize them; the other is Normal Ant which is used to get data and reinforce the optimization of the paths simultaneously. The GACF algorithm is a Quality of Service aware forwarding algorithm. It adaptively reduces the impacts incited by the dynamic complex network.