Augustus: a CCN router for programmable networks

ICN is an architecture proposed for the evolution of the Internet. Despite the attention it received from the research community its deployment has been slowed down by the significant upgrades required to the existing infrastructure. Software programmable networking frameworks constitute an opportunity for the deployment of ICN, as they allow fast deployment of novel technologies on commodity hardware. However a software implementation compatible with state-of-the-art programmable technologies guaranteeing the required level of performance is still not available. In this paper we introduce Augustus, a software architecture for an ICN router, and detail two different implementations: a stand-alone one and a modular one, that are also released as open-source code. The two implementations are deployed on a state-of-the-art hardware platform and their performance compared exploring different configurations. On the one hand, the performance analysis shows that with both implementations it is possible to achieve around 10 million packet per second, saturating 10,Gbit/s links with packet as small as 100,bytes. On the other hand, to achieve such performance the router must be carefully configured to fully exploits the hardware platform it runs on.