Caesar: A Content Router for High Speed Forwarding

Today, high-end routers forward hundreds of millions of packets per second by means of longest prefix match on forwarding tables with less than a million IP prefixes. Information-centric networking, a novel form of networking where content is requested by its name, poses a new challenge in the design of high-end routers: process at least the same amount of packets, assuming a forwarding table that contains hundreds of millions of content prefixes. In this paper, the authors design and preliminarily evaluate Caesar, the first content router that supports name-based forwarding at high speed. Caesar efficiently uses available processing and memory units in a high-end router to support forwarding tables containing a billion content prefixes with unlimited characters.