A Note on Routing Scalability in Named Data Networking

Abstract

The Information-Centric Networking (ICN) vision shifts network communication paradigm from node-centric IP to data-centric Named Data Networking (NDN). This position paper aims to identify the impact of the above architectural transformation on network routing and forwarding: what changes, and what does not? We first clarify a few basic terminologies in networking, including addresses, locators, and locations. We then explain that, as far as the network routing scalability is concerned, the basic solution approaches to scaling IP network routing are equally applicable to NDN networks. We further describe several unique NDN forwarding scalability solutions, which are enabled by naming data and NDN's stateful forwarding plane, and argue that rendezvousing on data opens a new dimension of solution space in network scalability.