A new NS3 Implementation of CCNx 1.0 Protocol

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new, modular NS3 implementation of the CCNx 1.0 protocol, enabling easier simulation and customization of ICN features within the NS3 network simulator.

Contribution

It provides a fresh, NS3-specific implementation of CCNx 1.0 with modular design, supporting easy customization and integration for researchers and developers.

Findings

Successful implementation of CCNx 1.0 in NS3

Supports flexible configuration of ICN components

Demonstrated with ICN caching experiments

Abstract

The ccns3Sim project is an open source implementation of the CCNx 1.0 protocols for the NS3 simulator. We describe the implementation and several important features including modularity and process delay simulation. The ccns3Sim implementation is a fresh NS3-specific implementation. Like NS3 itself, it uses C++98 standard, NS3 code style, NS3 smart pointers, NS3 xUnit, and integrates with the NS3 documentation and manual. A user or developer does not need to learn two systems. If one knows NS3, one should be able to get started with the CCNx code right away. A developer can easily use their own implementation of the layer 3 protocol, layer 4 protocol, forwarder, routing protocol, Pending Interest Table (PIT) or Forwarding Information Base (FIB) or Content Store (CS). A user may configure or specify a new implementation for any of these features at runtime in the simulation script. In this paper, we describe the software architecture and give examples of using the simulator. We evaluate the implementation with several example experiments on ICN caching.