Name Label Switching Paradigm for Named Data Networking

Named Data Networking (NDN) is regarded as one of the promising architectures of future Internet, in which every packet has a name and packet forwarding is based on lookup of name other than IP address. Scalable fast packet forwarding is always a challenge in NDN. In this letter, a MPLS-like label switching mechanism is proposed, called Name Label Switching (NLS), which uses fixed-length label swapping replacing unbounded name lookup at core nodes and caches data only at edge nodes. The NLS node architecture and forwarding process were presented, and its forwarding performance was analyzed and evaluated by simulation. It showed that NLS can improve the forwarding performance significantly. Using NLS, about 37% of the data response time and about 70% of the Interest packets processing time at core nodes can be saved, compared to native NDN.