Scalable name-based inter-domain routing for information-centric networks

Given the large volume of content on the Internet, scalability is one of the critical challenges in the design and development of information-centric network (ICN) architectures. In this paper we develop a scalable name-based inter-domain routing (NIDR) system that can meet the demanding requirement of supporting the large volume of content on the Internet in ICNs. NIDR adopts two critical techniques to improve its scalability. First, NIDR assumes a URL-like hierarchical content naming structure, and routes content-request packets based on only the domain name of content instead of the complete content name. Second, given the large number of domain names on the Internet, only a small subset of Internet domain names are announced at the inter-domain level. Domain names unknown to the NIDR system are first mapped (and routed) to their corresponding attachment point (AP) networks that are in the NIDR system, which is supported by a name resolution service. In addition to presenting the design of the NIDR system, we also evaluate the performance of NIDR and compare it with both BGP and EPIC, an enhancement over BGP. Our simulation studies based on the simBGP simulator show that NIDR can perform comparably with EPIC.