Design of a high-speed content-centric-networking router using content addressable memory

Abstract

Content-centric networking (CCN) is an innovative network architecture that is being considered as a successor to the Internet. To implement the novel technologies, however, requires routers with performance far superior to that offered by today’s Internet routers. Although many researchers have proposed various router components, such as caching and name lookup mechanisms, there are few router-level designs incorporating all the necessary components. The design and evaluation of a complete router is the primary contribution of this paper. We provide a concrete hardware design for a router model incorporating two entities that we propose. One of these entities is the name lookup entity (NLE), which looks up a name address within a few cycles from content addressable memory (CAM) by use of a Bloom filter; the other is the interest count entity (ICE), which supports to select content worth caching. Our contributions are (1) presenting a proper algorithm for looking up and matching name addresses in CCN communication, (2) proposing a method to process CCN packets in a way that achieves high throughput and very low latency, and (3) demonstrating performance and cost on the basis of a concrete hardware design.