Server-side Performance Evaluation of NDN

NDN is a promising protocol that can help to reduce congestion at Internet scale by putting content at the center of communications instead of hosts, and by providing each node with a caching capability. NDN can also natively authenticate transmitted content with a mechanism similar to website certificates that allows clients to assess the original provider. But this security feature comes at a high cost, as it relies heavily on asymmetric cryptography which affects server performance when NDN Data are generated. This is particularly critical for many services dealing with real-time data (VOIP, live streaming, etc.), but current tools are not adapted for a realistic server-side performance evaluation of NDN traffic generation when digital signature is used. We propose a new tool, NDNperf, to perform this evaluation and show that creating NDN packets is a major bottleneck of application performances. On our testbed, 14 server cores only generate \textbackslashtextasciitilde400 Mbps of new NDN Data with default packet settings. We propose and evaluate practical solutions to improve the performance of server-side NDN Data generation leading to significant gains.