Project Overview
While the Internet has far exceeded expectations, it has also stretched initial assumptions, often creating tussles that challenge its underlying communication model. Users and applications operate in terms of content, making it increasingly limiting and difficult to conform to IP's requirement to communicate by discovering and specifying location. To carry the Internet into the future, a conceptually simple yet transformational architectural shift is required, from today's focus on where -- addresses and hosts -- to what -- the content that users and applications care about.
The Named Data Networking (NDN) project aims to develop a new Internet architecture that can capitalize on strengths -- and address weaknesses -- of the Internet's current host-based, point-to-point communication architecture in order to naturally accommodate emerging patterns of communication. By naming data instead of their locations, NDN transforms data into a first-class entity. The current Internet secures the data container. NDN secures the contents, a design choice that decouples trust in data from trust in hosts, enabling several radically scalable communication mechanisms such as automatic caching to optimize bandwidth. The project studies the technical challenges that must be addressed to validate NDN as a future Internet architecture: routing scalability, fast forwarding, trust models, network security, content protection and privacy, and fundamental communication theory. The project uses end-to-end testbed deployments, simulation, and theoretical analysis to evaluate the proposed architecture, and is developing specifications and prototype implementations of NDN protocols and applications. NDN Technical Report NDN-0001 "Named Data Networking (NDN) Project" is a slightly modified version of the NDN project proposal.
The NDN project was funded by NSF in September 2010 as one of the four projects under NSF's Future Internet Architecture Program.
Recent News
NDN project team presented 2 papers at INFOCOM 2013 NOMEN Workshop, Securing Instrumented Environments over Content-Centric Networking: the Case of Lighting Control and NDN.JS: A JavaScript Client Library for Named Data Networking.
A ns-3 based NDN simulator was released last summer. Since then there has been a growing ndnSIM user community, many people around the world are playing with this new simulation platform now for NDN related experiments, and a ndnSIM mailing list is created for this community. We invite all interested parties to try out ndnSIM and send us feedback!
Van Jacobson gave a distinguished lecture at VeriSign recently. Burt Kaliski, VeriSign CTO, posted a nice blog about the talk, together with a pointer to the recording of Van's talk.