CoDE: Fast Name Lookup and Update using Conflict-driven Encoding

Abstract

Like IP lookup in the traditional networking, name lookup is a key technology for packet forwarding in the named data networking (NDN). However, unlike fixed-length IP addresses, such hierarchical names are of variable and unlimited length in theory. Both the large-scale name prefix database and high-frequency name update bring unprecedented challenges to the high-performance packet forwarding in the NDN. However, most existing approaches have drawbacks, such as the complex structure, the frequent memory access, and the time-consuming encoding, which make them difficult to meet these requirements. In this paper, we propose CoDE, an effective name lookup approach, to achieve both fast name lookup and update using conflict-driven encoding. CoDE has the following features: 1) The compact and scalable data structure can be stored in the cache; 2) The efficient index can fast locate the possible names and thus significantly speed up the name lookup and prefix update; and 3) The conflict-driven mechanism can greatly reduce the number of name components to be encoded. Experiments using real name prefix databases give an integrated evaluation. Compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms, CoDE achieves a high-performance name lookup which is an order of magnitude faster than the other algorithms on average and performs a fast prefix update which is twenty times that of the other algorithms on average. Moreover, CoDE saves at least half memory footprint of that of the other algorithms.