Architectural mechanisms for anycast provision in Named Data Networking

Named Data Networking(NDN) is a new networking architecture that centers around content distribution. However, service provision is equally important for the deployment of this new architecture. Today, Internet services are typically provisioned by a number of discrete servers or server farms to improve service scalability, reliability and performance. Although TCP/IP network provides a rich set of tools such as anycast routing, DNS resolution, packet rewriting and HTTP redirection to support anycast services with diversified requirements, these mechanisms cannot be directly ported to the NDN architecture due to the drastic changes in communication paradigm. In this paper, in addition to NDN's native anycast routing, we further proposed request rewriting, request redirection and hybrid mechanisms, to provide flexible anycast services in NDN. These mechanisms are studied for both the single server farm and multiple server farms scenarios. Several criteria such as scalability, flow-affinity, transparency and control over server selection are used to qualitatively analyze the pros and cons of each mechanism.