Subject: [icnrg] draft-oran-icnrg-reflexive-forwarding-02

From: Dirk Kutscher <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2022 16:07:31 +0100

Hi ICNRG,

Dave and I had been working on an update the Reflexive Forwarding specification, and we just submitted a new revision. As a heads-up: we are planning to present and discuss this with the community at our upcoming meeting at IETF-113.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-oran-icnrg-reflexive-forwarding/

**Abstract**

Current Information-Centric Networking protocols such as CCNx and NDN
have a wide range of useful applications in content retrieval and
other scenarios that depend only on a robust two-way exchange in the
form of a request and response (represented by an _Interest-Data
exchange_ in the case of the two protocols noted above).  A number of
important applications however, require placing large amounts of data
in the Interest message, and/or more than one two-way handshake.
While these can be accomplished using independent Interest-Data
exchanges by reversing the roles of consumer and producer, such
approaches can be both clumsy for applications and problematic from a
state management, congestion control, or security standpoint.  This
specification proposes a _Reflexive Forwarding_ extension to the CCNx
and NDN protocol architectures that eliminates the problems inherent
in using independent Interest-Data exchanges for such applications.
It updates RFC8569 and RFC8609.

**Key Changes**

The previous version was based on handling dynamic FIB entries. We have changed that know towards a token-based approach, inspired by the PIT token in the ndn-dpdk high-speed forwarder design [1] [2]. This design is allowing for less invasive and more efficient forwarder implementations, without being less robust/secure. It's also orthogonal to other potential enhancements such as path steering.

**Request for Feedback**

We are interested in feedback, especially from people who are working on forwarder implementations or on applications that require some kind of client-server-style communication, transferring consumer data to a producer etc.

Best regards,
Dave and Dirk

* [1] Junxiao Shi, Davide Pesavento, and Lotfi Benmohamed. 2020. NDN-DPDK: NDN Forwarding at 100 Gbps on Commodity Hardware. In <i>Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking</i> (ICN '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 30–40. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3405656.3418715
* [2] https://github.com/usnistgov/ndn-dpdk