Forwarding Strategies in Named Data Wireless Ad hoc Networks: Design and Evaluation

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a promising information-centric architecture for the future Internet that is also gaining momentum in wireless ad hoc networks as an alternative paradigm to traditional IP networking. NDN shares with other information-centric proposals the same innovative concepts, such as named content, name-based routing, and in-network content caching. These principles and the simple and robust communication model, based on Interest and Data packets exchange, make NDN especially appealing for deployment in wireless ad hoc environments, characterized by a broadcast error-prone channel and time-varying topologies. Nevertheless, making NDN-based solutions really effective in ad hoc networks requires rethinking some of the basic NDN forwarding principles to cope with wireless links and node mobility. In this paper, we analyze two classes of forwarding approaches: (i) a minimalist, provider-blind forwarding strategy, only aimed at keeping packet redundancy on the broadcast wireless medium under control, without any knowledge about the neighborhood and the identity of the content sources; and (ii) a provider-aware strategy, which leverages soft state information about the content sources, piggybacked in Interest and Data packets and locally kept by nodes, to facilitate content retrieval. Performance evaluation is carried by means of ndnSIM, the official NDN simulator, that is overhauled for use in realistic wireless ad hoc environments. Results collected under variable traffic loads and topologies provide insights into the behavior of both forwarding approaches and help to derive a set of recommendations that are crucial to the successful design of a forwarding strategy for named data ad hoc wireless networking.