Some observations on the performance of CCN-Flooding

Abstract

We focus on one of the earliest forwarding strategies proposed for Content-Centric Networks (CCN), namely the CCN-Flooding approach to populate the Forwarding Information Bases (FIB) and forward packets. Pure CCN-Flooding in its own right is a potentially viable, though highly deprecated, option to forward packets. But CCN-Flooding is also proposed as an integral component of alternative forwarding strategies. Thus, it cannot entirely be dismissed, and its behavior merits study. We examine the CCN-Flooding approach using a combination of several topologies and workload sets with differing characteristics. In addition to topological effects, we identify various issues that arise, such as: the difficulty of calibrating Pending Interest Table (PIT) timeouts; a PIT-induced isolation effect that negatively impacts bandwidth consumption and system response time; and the effects of adopting or not adopting FIB routes based on volatile in-network cache entries. In conclusion, we briefly compare CCN-Flooding vs. CCN-Publication when the overhead bandwidth costs of pre-populating FIBs in the latter are also taken into account.