Efficiently looking up non-aggregatable name prefixes by reducing prefix seeking

Content-Centric Networking (CCN) employs a hierarchical but location independent content naming scheme. While such a location independent naming brings various benefits including efficient content delivery, mobility, and multihoming, location independent name prefixes are hard to aggregate. This poses a serious scaling issue on the efficiency of looking up con-tent names in a huge Forwarding Information Base (FIB) by longest prefix matching, which requires seeking the longest matching prefix through all candidate prefix lengths. We propose a new scheme for efficiently looking up nonaggregatable name prefixes in a large FIB. The proposed scheme is based on the observation that the bottleneck of FIB lookup is the random accesses to the high-latency off-chip DRAM for prefix seeking and this can be reduced by exploiting the information on the longest matching prefix length in the previous hop.