A Review on Recent NDN FIB Implementations for High-Speed Switches

Abstract

AbstractForwarding Information Base (FIB) plays an essential role in Named-Data Networking (NDN) since it allows contents identified by unique hierarchical names to be reachable anywhere. Over the last few years, the advances in programmable switches have become possible to implement data structures for FIB in hardware to run at line rate. However, such implementations are not trivial in these devices, taking into account its architectural constraints and some NDN features like the complexity of dealing with variable-length names and the FIB size being orders of magnitude larger than the current IP routing tables. Despite all the benefits that high-speed switches may bring to NDN as a whole, the literature has been missing a survey that covers the data structures for FIB designed specifically to run in physical switches. To this end, we present a review on recent FIB implementations for both fixed-function and programmable high-speed switches. Our main contribution includes a fair and new comparative analysis among different approaches to implement the FIB highlighting its features and limitations. We also provide new insights and future research directions in this field.