Route prefix caching using bloom filters in named data networking

Abstract

This paper proposes an elaborate route prefix caching scheme for fast packet forwarding in named data networking (NDN) which is a next-generation Internet structure. The name lookup is a crucial function of the NDN router, which delivers a packet based on its name rather than IP address. It carries out a complex process to find the longest matching prefix for the content name. Even the size of a name prefix is variable and unbounded; thus, the name lookup is to be more complicated and time-consuming. The name lookup can be sped up by using route prefix caching, but it may cause a problem when non-leaf prefixes are cached. The proposed prefix caching scheme can cache non-leaf prefixes, as well as leaf prefixes, without incurring any problem. For this purpose, a Bloom filter is kept for each prefix. The Bloom filter, which is widely used for checking membership, is utilized to indicate the branch information of a non-leaf prefix. The experimental result shows that the proposed caching scheme achieves a much higher hit ratio than other caching schemes. Furthermore, how much the parameters of the Bloom filter affect the cache miss count is quantitatively evaluated. The best performance can be achieved with merely 8-bit Bloom filters and two hash functions.