Enabling Correct Interest Forwarding and Retransmissions in a Content Centric Network

TL;DR

This paper identifies limitations in existing content-centric networking protocols for detecting Interest loops and introduces SIFAH, a new Interest forwarding strategy that guarantees correctness and improves network performance.

Contribution

The paper presents SIFAH, the first Interest forwarding strategy proven correct under all network conditions, enhancing Interest loop detection and forwarding accuracy in content-centric networks.

Findings

SIFAH effectively detects Interest loops where previous methods fail.

Simulation results show SIFAH reduces Interest looping and improves network throughput.

Undetected Interest loops negatively impact CCN and NDN performance.

Abstract

We show that the mechanisms used in the name data networking (NDN) and the original content centric networking (CCN) architectures may not detect Interest loops, even if the network in which they operate is static and no faults occur. Furthermore, we show that no correct Interest forwarding strategy can be defined that allows Interest aggregation and attempts to detect Interest looping by identifying Interests uniquely. We introduce SIFAH (Strategy for Interest Forwarding and Aggregation with Hop-Counts), the first Interest forwarding strategy shown to be correct under any operational conditions of a content centric network. SIFAH operates by having forwarding information bases (FIBs) store the next hops and number of hops to named content, and by having each Interest state the name of the requested content and the hop count from the router forwarding an Interest to the content. We present the results of simulation experiments using the ndnSIM simulator comparing CCN and NDN with SIFAH. The results of these experiments illustrate the negative impact of undetected Interest looping when Interests are aggregated in CCN and NDN, and the performance advantages of using SIFAH.