N‐BGP: An efficient BGP routing protocol adaptation for named data networking

Abstract

SummaryNamed data networking (NDN) is gaining momentum as a future Internet architecture. NDN is a type of information‐centric networking (ICN) that attempts to change the current Internet architecture from host/location‐centric to content‐centric, where data retrieving is done by the names of the contents irrespective of the location of the data. A mechanism to advertise the name‐based prefixes between different domains is necessary to accelerate the NDN deployment. In IP‐based routing, border gateway protocol (BGP) is the de facto inter‐domain routing protocol that plays a vital role in Internet communication by enabling different Internet domains to exchange routing information. In its current form, BGP can advertise and process IP‐based prefixes, but it cannot advertise or process NDN name‐based prefixes. Accordingly, BGP needs to be extended to support NDN technology. This paper proposes an NDN extension for BGP, referred to as N‐BGP, that offers a solution to exchange name‐based routes in the current BGP networks. This proposed extension modifies the traditional BGP speaker into a hybrid one. This hybrid speaker is qualified to understand, advertise, receive, process, and store both IP‐based and name‐based routes simultaneously and efficiently, without disturbing or breaking the current Internet operation; that is, it can coexist along with traditional speakers. We also validate and evaluate our proposed solution in a hybrid environment, and the results show that N‐BGP has the capability to exchange and process both Name and IP‐based routes efficiently.