Design of a high-speed content-centric-networking router using content addressable memory

Content-centric networking (CCN) is an innovative network architecture that is being considered as a successor to the Internet. To implement the novel technologies, however, requires routers with performance far superior to that offered by today´s Internet routers. Although many researchers have proposed various router components, such as caching and name lookup mechanisms, there are few router-level designs incorporating all the necessary components. The design and evaluation of a complete router is the primary contribution of this paper. We provide a concrete hardware design for a router model incorporating two entities that we propose. One of these entities is the name lookup entity (NLE), which looks up a name address within a few cycles from content addressable memory (CAM) by use of a Bloom filter; the other is the interest count entity (ICE), which supports to select content worth caching. Our contributions are (1) presenting a proper algorithm for looking up and matching name addresses in CCN communication, (2) proposing a method to process CCN packets in a way that achieves high throughput and very low latency, and (3) demonstrating performance and cost on the basis of a concrete hardware design.