iGate: NDN Gateway for Tunneling over IP World

Named Data Networking (NDN) presents strong bandwidth benefits on edge networks because its in-network caching design is probably fit for popularity and locality. However, separate NDN edge regions cannot be efficiently connected over IP backbone world, slowing down the deployment of NDN edges. Due to the difference of stateful NDN and stateless IP in forwarding principles, the coexistence of two protocols is difficult and challenging in the network layer. In this paper, we propose iGate, an NDN gateway design for tunneling over IP world, to bridge two kinds of protocols in the same layer. iGate translates protocols between stateful NDN and stateless IP by two temporary tables. It considers many factors about gateway efficiency, like table tunning, minimal NDN integration, TCP/UDP alternatives. We evaluate the performance of iGate with a real implementation on Linux and the results show that it can achieve more than 85.03% translation efficiency and less than 29% protocol conversion delay compared with IP VPN which uses the typical tunneling technology over IP network. Our work presents a practical and highly-efficient solution to assemble NDN edges into IP world, and can be applied to other similar Information-Centric Networking (ICN) designs.