A Reality check for Content Centric Networking

Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is a novel networking paradigm for communication networks. Under the CCN premise, a communication network is designed around content distribution rather than host-to-host connectivity. This change from host-centric to content-centric has several attractive advanatages, such as network load reduction, shorter dissemination latency, improved network manageability and even energy efficiency. However, it is unclear weather today technology is ready for the CCN (r)evolution. The major contribution of this paper is a reality check for CCN: we systematically evaluate the suitability of existing software and hardware components in today routers for the support of CCN. We find that today's routers can be easily extended to support caching. However, an Internet scale implementation of CCN would suffer a scalability problem due to the explosion of the routing state.