On Incremental Deployment Of Named Data Networking In Local Area Networks

A data-centric network architecture, Named Data Networking (NDN) has been developed to meet applications' growing demands of network efficiency and security. Considering that today's network is predominantly IP, any deployment of NDN requires careful system design to not only enable NDN but also support IP traffic at the same time. In this paper, we take the most popular local area network (LAN) technology, Ethernet, as an example to investigate incremental deployment of NDN. Assuming a local network with both NDN and IP traffic, we lay out three deployment scenarios: NDN-enabled hosts and all Ethernet switches, NDN-enabled hosts and all Dual-Stack switches (i.e., they can process both NDN and IP traffic), and a hybrid network with both Dual-Stack and Ethernet switches. We examine the technical issues involved in each scenario and propose solutions. In particular, in the hybrid scenario, we propose heuristics to optimize the placement of Dual-Stack switches. Compared with traditional Ethernet, introducing Dual-Stack switches can improve network efficiency and resiliency by utilizing all physical links, spreading traffic load over the links, and taking shorter paths, while still supporting IP-based applications.