PIT Overload Analysis in Content Centric Networks

Content Centric Networking represents a paradigm shift in the evolution and definition of modern network protocols. Many research efforts have been made with the purpose of proving the feasibility and the scalability of this proposal. Our main contribution is to provide an analysis of the Pending Interest Table memory requirements in real deployment scenarios, especially considering the impact of distributed denial of service attacks. In fact, the state that the protocol maintains for each resource request makes the routers more prone to resources exhaustion issues than in traditional stateless solutions. Our results are derived by using a full custom simulator and considering the different node architectures that have been proposed as valid reference models. The main outcomes point out differentiated weaknesses in each architecture we investigated and underline the need for improvements in terms of security and scalability.