On the Design and Implementation of a wire-speed Pending Interest Table

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a novel networking paradigm that aims at making network routers aware of the data they transfer. This new paradigm requires changes in the routers in order to support networking operations on content names at wire speed. NDN, one of the most popular ICN proposal, also suggests that routers should keep track of what content is requested and from which line-card's interface, in a data structure called Pending Interest Table (PIT). In this work, we set out to understand how to design a PIT that can support wire-speed. We survey the existing literature and propose few new designs; then, we evaluate numerically the design spectrum for the PIT. Finally, we implement the most promising design on a network processor and evaluate its performance. Our preliminary results are encouraging: we successfully handle a PIT with about 1 Million entries with a wire-speed of 10 Gbps.