Radient: Scalable, memory efficient name lookup algorithm for named data networking

Named Data Networking (NDN) aims to discard the existing host-centric networking paradigm just to replace it with a more practical Content-Centric Networking (CCN) paradigm. CCN allows users to fetch and distribute contents directly using their names. NDN router stores all incoming content requests (/-delimited string components) in the Pending Interest Table (PIT) until they are satisfied. Multiple requests for the same content are merged in a single PIT entry and when the requested content is available, it is forwarded simultaneously to all the requesters. Although NDN has several benefits over the existing IP-based network, replacing IP addresses with names increases memory consumption and lookup cost. One possible way to restrict memory usage is to use name encoding, i.e., to encode identical components of a name with a unique integer. In this paper, we proposed a novel memory efficient name encoding scheme (called, Radient) for PIT and evaluated it extensively. Our results show that the Radient scheme can reduce memory consumption by 35.45% compared to the ENPT for 29 million names.