A More Scalable Approach to Content Centric Networking

On-demand Content Exchange with Adaptive Naming (OCEAN) is introduced as an alternative to content centric networking approaches (NDN and CCN) that require the maintenance of forwarding state of each Interest traversing a router in a Pending Interest Table (PIT). Content routers in OCEAN maintain data answer routing tables (DART) to support the correct forwarding of Interests and responses to such Interests (content or negative acknowledgments) without divulging the identities of consumers who originate Interests. The size of a DART is proportional to the number of routes used by Interests traversing a router, rather than the number of Interests traversing a router. It is shown that undetected Interest loops cannot occur in OCEAN, while the same is not true for CCN and NDN, and that Interests and responses to Interests are forwarded correctly in the absence of failures. OCEAN attains similar latencies than NDN and CCN but incurs orders of magnitude less storage overhead.