Performance Assessment of Routing Strategies in Named Data Networking

Information Centric Networking (ICN) architectures are currently being investigated to orient the Future Internet towards a content centric paradigm, thus allowing the provisioning of more secure, efficient, and scalable services. In this work, we focus on the Named Data Networking (NDN) proposal to analyze the impact of several routing and forwarding strategies, which play a fundamental role in ICN. In particular, thanks to the recently devised ns-3 based NDN simulator, namely ndnSIM, we conduce an extensive simulation campaign using the GEANT topology as a core network. We monitor different distinctive metrics, such as file download time, server load reduction, hit ratio, hit distance, and communication overhead, in different topologies and traffic conditions. Simulation results show that the election of a single best forwarding strategy is a difficult task. Indeed, the pros and cons of each strategy are heavily influenced by the popularity distribution of contents, which, in turn, affects the effectiveness of the distributed caching mechanisms typically used in the NDN architecture.