ccnSim: An highly scalable CCN simulator

Research interest about Information Centric Networking (ICN) has grown at a very fast pace over the last few years, especially after the 2009 seminal paper of Van Jacobson et al. describing a Content Centric Network (CCN) architecture. While significant research effort has been produced in terms of architectures, algorithms, and models, the scientific community currently lacks common tools and scenarios to allow a fair cross-comparison among the different proposals. The situation is particularly complex as the commonly used general-purpose simulators cannot cope with the expected system scale: thus, many proposals are currently evaluated over small and unrealistic scale, especially in terms of dominant factors like catalog and cache sizes. As such, there is need of a scalable tool under which different algorithms can be tested and compared. Over the last years, we have developed and optimized ccnSim, an highly scalable chunk-level simulator especially suitable for the analysis of caching performance of CCN network. In this paper, we briefly describe the tool, and present an extensive benchmark of its performance. To give an idea of ccnSim scalability, a common off-the-shelf PC equipped with 8GB of RAM memory is able to simulate 2-hours of a 50-nodes CCN network, where each nodes is equipped with 10GB caches, serving a 1PB catalog in about 20 min CPU time.