Toward an ideal NDN router on a commercial off-the-shelf computer

The goal of the paper is to present what an ideal NDN forwarding engine on a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) computer is supposed to be. The paper designs a reference forwarding engine by selecting well-established high-speed techniques and then analyzes state-of-the-art prototype implementation to know its performance bottleneck. The microarchitectural analysis at the level of CPU pipelines and instructions reveals that dynamic random access memory (DRAM) access latency is one of bottlenecks for high-speed forwarding engines. Finally, the paper designs two prefetch-friendly packet processing techniques to hide DRAM access latency. The prototype according to the techniques achieves more than 40 million packets per second packet forwarding on a COTS computer.