Accelerate NDN name lookup using FPGA: Challenges and a scalable approach

Recently, Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) have been shown to be of value in supporting wire-speed name lookup in Named Data Networking (NDN). However, due to the computing model on GPU, the lookup latency is not so encouraging. In this paper, we shift the focus from GPU to Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). We highlight three key challenges in accelerating name lookup using FPGA, and then present a scalable approach to address them. In our approach, a hierarchical and compact data structure is proposed to represent the name trie, which achieves not only effective pipeline mapping but also high memory efficiency. Further, it is finally implemented as a linear pipeline on the FPGA platform, enabling both fast lookup speed and low lookup latency. The experimental results show that our approach gains a reduction of memory cost over 90% compared with the referred GPU-based solution. Besides, the lookup throughput of our approach is almost 2.4 times higher, and the latency is up to 3 orders of magnitude lower.