$\alpha$Route: Routing on Names

Abstract

One of the crucial building blocks for Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a name based routing scheme that can route directly on content names instead of IP addresses. However, moving the address space from IP addresses to content names brings the scalability issues to a whole new level, due to two reasons. First, name aggregation is not as trivial a task as the IP address aggregation in BGP routing. Second, the number of addressable contents in the Internet is several orders of magnitude higher than the number of IP addresses. With the current size of the Internet, name based, anycast routing is very challenging specially when routing efficiency is of prime importance. We propose a name-based routing scheme $\alpha$ Route for ICN that offers efficient bandwidth usage, guaranteed content lookup and scalable routing table size. $\alpha$ Route consists of two components: an alphanumeric Distributed Hash Table (DHT) and an overlay to underlay (Internet topology) mapping algorithm. Simulation results show that $\alpha$ Route performs significantly better than Content Centric Network (CCN) in terms of network bandwidth usage, lookup latency and load balancing.