New Publication: A Low-Cost NDN Testbed on Banana Pi Routers

We are proud to announce that our article A Low-Cost NDN Testbed on Banana Pi Routers has been accepted for publication in IEEE Communications Magazine (Network Testing and Analytics Series). The article will be published in the third quarter of 2016. You may find the abstract of the article below, and a preprint version here.

Abstract The computer communication research community shows significant interest in the paradigm of Information-Centric Networking (ICN). Continuously, new proposals for ICN-related challenges (caching, forwarding, etc.) are published. However, due to a lack of a readily available testbed, the majority of these proposals is evaluated either by theoretical analysis and/or by conducting network simulations potentially masking further challenges that are not observable in synthetic environments. Therefore, this article presents a framework for an ICN testbed using low-budget physical hardware with little deployment and maintenance effort for the individual researcher; specifically, Named Data Networking is considered. The employed hardware and software are powerful enough for most research projects, but extremely resource intensive tasks may push both components towards their limits. The testbed framework is based on well established open source software and provides the tools to readily investigate important ICN characteristics on physical hardware emulating arbitrary network topologies. The article discusses the testbed architecture and provides first results obtained from emulations that investigate the performance of various forwarding strategies. The results indicate that further challenges have to be overcome when heading towards a real-world deployment of ICN-based communication. (© 2016 IEEE Communications Magazine) [bibtex]

More Infos about the IEEE Communications Magazine Network Testing and Analytics Series can be found here.