Prefix hopping: efficient many-to-many communication support in information centric networks

Named Data Networking [1] has an intrinsic distributed nature, which eases decentralizing formerly centralized protocols as discussed in [12], [10]. Nevertheless, implementing fully distributed protocols for many-to-many communications remains challenging. The NDN architecture, built upon CCN [3], makes the following assumptions in order to place content as the narrow waist of the communication stack: (1) content, not machines, should be explicitly addressed and (2) data are not sent unless the receiver explicitly requested it. These assumptions require some specific considerations when multiple parties publish content under the same name, as in some many-to-many communication applications. This paper discusses the challenges arising from the implementation of many-to-many channels over NDN.We propose an algorithm, inspired by the frequency hopping algorithm used in wireless systems, named Prefix Hopping (PH) to implement high rate many-to-many channels. We show evidence that with the current state of the art, content updates can be lost when generic shared names are used, due to the fact that interest packets - i.e. data requests - can be generated at a fixed bounded rate. The results show how adopting PH is possible to arbitrarily reduce data losses at the cost of a negligible overhead. We have implemented PH and show that it results in a dramatic performance improvement.