CSF: Controller based Selective Forwarding in Software Defined Named Data based MANETs Farwa Ansari, Rana Asif Rehman Department of Computer Science National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences Chiniot-Faisalabad Campus 35400, Pakistan farwaansari14@gmail.com, r.asif@nu.edu.pk Byung-Seo Kim Department of Software and Communications Engineering Hongik University Sejong City 30016, South Korea jsnbs@hongik.ac.kr Abstract—Software Defined Networking (SDN) is the more reliable and flexible networking architecture. Due to its pro- grammable nature, it is getting more popular in every research domain of Computing. Moreover, Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture is also more beneficial and emerging tech- nology of Internet. NDN focuses on the content name instead of its location and replaces the usage of IP addresses. Lot of research has been made to integrate SDN and NDN due to their benefits of better management-ability, flexibility, less complexity, centralized control, decoupled control and data planes etc. Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is also getting more popular due to huge advancement in Mobile communication devices. Combining SDN and NDN in MANET will resolve lots of problems (i.e. forwarding, mobility, management etc.) which are difficult to tackle with single architecture. Broadcast Storm is always a challenging issue in Ad Hoc networks like MANET. In this paper, we proposed a Controller based Selective Forwarding (CSF) scheme by merging SDN, NDN and MANET to overcome the Broadcast Storm Problem (BSP) and other issues caused by BSP. CSF is evaluated using different simulation parameters which shows superiority over the Native ND-MANET in reference to BSP. Index Terms—Software Defined Network, NDN, Ad Hoc Net- works, Broadcast, Storm, Named Data Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (ND-MANETs) I. I NTRODUCTION Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) [1] is a continu- ously self configuring and infrastructure-less network. It is a distributed network, lacking a centralized administrative entity and contains mobile devices which have dynamic and arbitrary movement in the network. Therefore, we call the network as MANET. In MANET, each node communicate with others within its range. Most routes used in MANET are multihop. In short, MANET is an unpredictable network due to continuous dynamic nature of its nodes. With the advancement in the mobile devices, MANET is considered to be an important part of smart communication. MANET nodes exchange information with each other within their own specific range. This information can be related to the military applications, searching, shopping, collaborative computing and Intrusion detection/security etc. [2]–[4]. Originally, MANET uses TCP/IP protocol stack for communication. But with a huge advancement in the mobile devices the usage of mobile devices continue to grow. Hence, the IP addresses increase as well. Therefore, with the growing number of IP addresses, it Fig. 1: Comparative Hourglass Architecture of IP vs NDN was hectic task to manage IP addresses. Hence, the research trends changed towards finding a solution to replace the usage of TCP/IP. Later on, keeping the communication trends as a focal point, in 2007 Van Jacobson proposed a Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture. Named Data Network (NDN) [5] uses name-based routing Mechanism. Since, users do not care about the location of contents rather, they focus on the name of the content. That is why, proposed NDN architecture focuses only on what content is required i.e. The Name, instead of where it is required i.e. The Location. NDN has three data structures (i) Content Store (CS) (ii) Pending Interest Table (PIT) (iii) Forwarding Interest Table (FIB) and two communication entities (i) Consumer (ii) Provider. CS keeps a copy of every content received. FIB records the routes required in forwarding. PIT keeps track of all the pending Interests. While Consumer node is a node that requests a content and Provider node entertains that request with required Data. Moreover, NDN replaced the traditional IP packets with two new packets: (i) Interest Packet (ii) Data Packet. Interest Packet is used by consumer node while Data packet is used by the Provider node. Hourglass architecture of both IP and NDN packets is shown in Fig. 1. However, the nodes in traditional networks does both the route calculation and forwarding, which leaves more workload 978-1-7281-0960-2/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE