A Low-Cost NDN Testbed on Banana Pi Routers

The computer communication research community has a significant interest in the paradigm of ICN. Continuously, new proposals for ICN-related challenges (caching, forwarding, etc.) are published. However, due to a lack of a readily available testbed, the majority of these proposals are evaluated by either theoretical analysis and/or conducting network simulations, potentially masking further challenges that are not observable in synthetic environments. Therefore, this article presents a framework for an ICN testbed using low-budget physical hardware with little deployment and maintenance effort for the individual researcher; specifically, named data networking is considered. The employed hardware and software are powerful enough for most research projects, but extremely resource-intensive tasks may push both components toward their limits. The testbed framework is based on well established open source software and provides the tools to readily investigate important ICN characteristics on physical hardware emulating arbitrary network topologies. The article discusses the testbed architecture and provides first results obtained from emulations that investigate the performance of various forwarding strategies. The results indicate that further challenges have to be overcome when heading towards a real-world deployment of ICN-based communication.