A comparative study of name resolution and routing mechanisms in information-centric networks

Abstract Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is an innovative paradigm for the future Internet architecture, which addresses IP network limitations in supporting content distribution and information access by decoupling content from hosts and providing the ability to retrieve a content object by its name (identifier), rather than its storage location (IP address). Name resolution and routing is critical for content retrieval in ICN networks. In this research, we perform a comparative study of two widely used classes of ICN name resolution and routing schemes, namely flooding and Distributed Hash Table (DHT). We consider the flooding-based routing in Content-Centric Networks due to its wide acceptance. For the DHT scheme, we design a multi-level DHT that takes into account the underlying network topology and uses name aggregation to further reduce control overhead and improve network efficiency. Then, we compare the characteristics and performance of these two classes of name resolution and routing through extensive simulations. The evaluation results show that the performance of these two approaches are reliant on several factors including network size, content location dynamics, and content popularity. Our study reveals insights into the design tradeoffs and offers guidelines for design strategies.