Combing CCN with network coding: An architectural perspective

Content-centric networking and network coding both revolve around content distribution, trading storage and computation for bandwidth respectively. Although it was believed network coding benefits CCN, the real advantages, architectural implications and design choices are not fully explored. In this paper, we first investigated the possible advantages of combing network coding with CCN. We argue doing so can eliminate the fine-grained naming in CCN, effectively utilize multi-path parallel forwarding, reduce the complexity of cache coordination and simplify the transport design. We then analyzed the architectural implications and design choices for incorporating network coding with CCN, especially the architectural changes arising from the semantic difference of naming. Finally, following the architectural implications, we proposed a prototype implementation called NC-CCN and evaluated its performance by substantial simulations. We compared two matching mechanisms for linear dependency checking, and found that the rank-based matching mechanism(RB-Matching) can achieve slightly lower performance compared with precise matching mechanism(Precise-Matching) with much lower computation and communication overhead.