Enabling Tunneling in CCN

Content-centric networking (CCN) is a new networking architecture that adopts a receiver-driven transport design with pervasive in-network cache support, which precisely meets the present Internet usage pattern. However, present CCN design lacks support for tunneling, which is proved to be an important feature that simplifies the addition of new network functionality to the network and eases the network architecture evolution. In this letter, we propose a mechanism to add tunneling capability to the CCN with full compatibility with CCN's naming convention and forwarding logic. We show that the proposed tunneling mechanism not only works, but also largely inherits the performance benefits introduced by the CCN architecture.