Caesar: A content Router for High-speed Forwarding on content Names
16 February 2017
Forwarding on name-based identifiers is receving increasing attention as a growing number of in-network services are built on location-independent identifiers, e.g., DNS and CDNs. In addition, Information Centric Networking (ICN) is proposing to provide name-based forwarding as a basic communication primitive. In this paper we present Caesar, a router design for high-speed forwarding on hierarchical name-based identifiers. Caesar is based on Longest Prefix Matching using Bloom Filters, and can be deployed over existing network devices without the need of hardware upgrade. Our experiments on a small scale router prototype show the design can sustain up to 9 Mpps, with 10M prefixes per line-card, outperforming previously proposed solutions. We also propose two extensions to the basic design: distributed processing over multiple line-cards to increase the amount of state Caesar can store, and lookup offload to GPU to increase the rate of operations sustained. We show those enhancements allow to linearly increase the amount of prefixes stored on the router, i.e.,50M prefixes over 5 line-cards and to sustain an order of magnitude more incoming packets, i.e.,100 MPPS.
