SAMBA: Scalable Approximate Forwarding For NDN Implicit FIB Aggregation

The Internet landscape has witnessed a significant shift toward Information Centric Networking (ICN) due to the exponential growth of data-driven applications. Similar to routing tables in TCP/IP architectures, ICN uses Forward Information Base (FIB) tables. However, FIB tables can grow exponentially due to their URL-like naming scheme, introducing major delays in the prefix lookup process. Existing explicit FIB aggregation solutions are very complex to run, and ICN on-demand routing schemes, which use a discovery mechanism to help reduce the number of FIB records and thus have shorter lookup times, rely on flooding-based mechanisms and building routes for all requests, introducing additional scalability challenges. In this paper, we propose SAMBA, an Approximate Forwarding-based Self Learning, that uses the nearest FIB trie record to the given prefix for reducing the number of discoveries thus keeping the FIB table small. By choosing the nearest prefix to a given name prefix, SAMBA uses Implicit Prefix Aggregation (IPA) which implicitly aggregates the FIB records and reduces the number of Self Learning discoveries required. Coupled with the approximate forwarding, SAMBA can achieve efficient and scalable forwarding