Research Of A Flexible Open Forwarding System For Information-centric Networking

Information-Centric Networking(ICN)is proposed as a new network architecture,which aims to solve the disadvantages of the current end-to-end network.The proposal of ICN overturns the current network architecture.Due to its innovation,the existing forwarding devices cannot support the deployment of the ICN experimental platform.Researchers need to develop their own forwarding devices and deploy experimental platforms.During the rapid development of ICN,proprietary forwarding devices need to be redeveloped as the ICN protocol evolves and routing algorithms are updated.Therefore,researchers need to spend a lot of time on the development of forwarding devices and deployment of experimental platforms,resulting in the slow research progress and unreachable actual deployment of ICN.To solve this problem,this thesis has carried out research of a flexible open forwarding system for ICN.First,by combining with Software-Defined Networking(SDN),this thesis proposes a SDN southbound protocol that supports ICN.Based on the Openflow protocol,this protocol is developed with the characteristics of ICN.By adding the protocol management,routing management and content management southbound messages of ICN,this protocol provides the open management interfaces for the ICN forwarding devices.Different from the rigid integration in the existing SDN and ICN fusion schemes,this fused southbound protocol can take full advantage of both.Then,based on the extended southbound protocol,this thesis proposes a flexible open forwarding system for ICN.This forwarding system consists of a southbound processing module and a generic packet-processing module.The southbound processing module is designed according to the expanded southbound protocol.It provides the necessary protocol and routing information for the generic packet-processing module by analyzing various southbound messages.Different from the traditional forwarding devices,the generic packet-processing module is unbound with the protocol,which processes packets according to the information provided by the southbound processing module.In addition,special actions such as the content caching and distribution,path recording and deletion are added in the generic packet-processing module,which fully satisfies the characteristics of ICN.The two modules complement each other and cooperate to implement a flexible open forwarding system for ICN.Finally,this thesis implements the forwarding system based on Open vswitch,and verifies its availability and efficiency through experiments.The data show that our system is better than Named Data Networking Forwarding Daemon and Protocol-Independent Packet Processors behavioural-model.The networking experiments show that researchers can use this universal forwarding system to deploy the universal ICN experiment platform,which effectively solves the problems faced by ICN.Through the open management interfaces,researchers can flexibly manage the protocols,routing algorithms,and content caching policies supported by the forwarding system.It can meet the requirements of the ICN protocol research,routing algorithm research,and content caching research.It prevents researchers from spending a lot of time on device development during the research process.Researchers can deploy a qualifying experimental platform simply and quickly by this forwarding system,which can effectively speed up the ICN research.