BalanceDN: Load-Balancing Allocation of Interest for Fast Discovery in Content Centric Networks

In Named Data Networking (NDN), data is identified by unique names instead of IP addresses, and routers use the names of the content to forward Interest packets towards the producers of the requested content. However, the current content search mechanism in NDN is complex and slow. This mechanism not only creates congestion but also hinders practical deployment due to its slowness and cumbersome nature. To address this issue, we propose a methodology, called BalanceDN, that distributes content through the network such that sought content can be found quickly. BalanceDN uses a distributed allocation of resolvers as those used by the domain name system but differs in how content is distributed. Our approach avoids flooding the network with pending interest requests and also eliminates the need for blind search when the location of content is unknown. We tested our approach on a simulation platform for NDN called ndnSIM. The results show that the proposed routing scheme utilizes far fewer network resources compared to the NDN network when retrieving content. The proposed scheme accomplishes this performance gain by leveraging a load-balanced hashing mechanism to distribute and locate the name of the content on the distributed nameserver lookup service nodes.