Scalable Forwarding for Information-Centric Networks

Information-centric networking (ICN) 1 is a new communication paradigm, which has been increasingly attracting attention in the wider research community. Its focus on information provides an alternative to the endpoint-centric model of today's Internet. While architectural foundations for ICN have been laid out in many ongoing efforts, solutions to forwarding information in such new networking environment still remain a challenge. Our criteria for a solution to this challenge are efficiency in terms of achievable link speed and scalability in terms of supported sizes of the network, while supporting multicast as a native operation. Our solution in this paper provides scalability through an extensible addressing format while keeping the forwarding operation efficient in terms of required state as well as forwarding performance.