Evaluating pending interest table performance under the collusive interest flooding attack in named data networks

In this article, we investigate the performance of the Pending Interest Table (PIT) of named data networking (NDN) routers in the presence of a collusive interest flooding attack (CIFA), which can overwhelm the PIT and cause delays in content retrieval. We simulate and evaluate the attack’s impact on the PIT occupancy rate and content retrieval delay. The results reveal that the CIFA is highly effective in compromising the performance of NDN routers, leading to high PIT occupancy rates, long content retrieval delays, and degraded overall network performance. The PIT occupancy rate can reach 95.83% during the attack, while the interest retrieval rate is less than 30%. The study highlights the need for effective countermeasures to mitigate the impact of such attacks.