Migrating From IP to NDN Using Dual-Channel Translation Gateway

The emergence of communication networks has resulted in a system of content-based networks. Therefore, a novel network design called Information-Centric Networking (ICN) promotes the efficient transfer of content objects, whereas Named-Data Networking (NDN) is one of the most promising candidates. While migration from Internet Protocol (IP) to NDN is inevitable, it is prohibitively expensive to replace all routers instantaneously with NDN routers during the transition period. Hence, we propose the dual-channel IP-to-NDN translation gateway to address this problem. The gateway promotes the semantics of the IP protocol to be equal to those of NDN at the network layer by utilizing two unique IP addresses as channels so that it can distinguish an IP packet as either an interest or a data packet. In addition, the proposed gateway uses a name binding mechanism to transmit packets between IP and NDN hosts seamlessly by conducting non-data-payload reading to preserve the privacy of users. Finally, the throughput performance of the dual-channel gateway is examined for two distinct binding strategies, namely static and dynamic prefix-name binding. We analyze the throughput by comparing a throughput-estimation model with an emulation testbed. Especially, we emphasize the relationship between the hit ratio, processing delay, and throughput. According to numerical evaluation, we show that the throughput-estimation model successfully predicts the throughput with an accuracy of about 90% and 85% in static and dynamic prefix-name binding schemes, respectively. Moreover, the results show that an increase in content popularity skewness, alpha, from 0.7 to 1.5 improved the throughput of the proposed gateway by about 70% when the cache size was 1% of the prefix name count in the static prefix-name binding. Alternatively, the throughput increased ten times when the content popularity skewness increased from 0.7 to 1.5 in the dynamic prefix-name binding.