On simulating Bloom filters in the ndnSIM open source simulator

Abstract

Name Data Networking (NDN) is a novel information-centric architecture, based on networking primitives that are driven by hierarchical content names. It promises to ease the development of content sharing services, simplify the management of mobile applications across heterogeneous wireless technologies, and enable native multicast and multipath communication. In this context, simulation tools play an important role because they offer the possibility to easily evaluate, even in large scale scenarios, the performance of new protocols, algorithms, and design methodologies for the NDN architecture. Among the several simulators that are available nowadays, ndnSIM, which is a module of the well known NS-3 open source framework, can be considered as the most complete one due to its accurate representation of all the facets of the NDN architecture. To further broaden its scope, an extension that models and simulates Bloom filters is proposed in this manuscript. As a matter of fact, the adoption of Bloom filters in NDN represents an active research branch, for which an open source simulation platform is still missing. The proposed extension allows the simulation of several types of Bloom filters for different purposes, such as membership check of locally cached contents, and/or name lookup in forwarding strategies designed for information-centric architectures. This manuscript provides all the details of the new software module (from the design criteria to an accurate description of the code), as well as results gathered from the simulation of several use cases and from a scalability test.