Updates

First public release of NDN Forwarding Daemon (NFD)

We are pleased to announce the initial public release (version 0.2.0) of the NDN Forwarding Daemon (NFD). NFD is a network forwarder that implements the Named Data Networking (NDN) protocol. More details about NFD, release notes, HOWTOs, a FAQ and other useful resources are available at NFD’s official webpage.

Also available is the NFD developer’s guide, which provides a detailed description of the implementation internals.

An important goal of NFD is to support the broader community to experiment with the NDN architecture. Thus, the current release emphasizes modularity and extensibility over performance to allow easy experimentation with new protocol features, algorithms, data structures and applications. We invite all interested parties to experiment with the existing code and submit their contributions to NFD Redmine or directly to Gerrit Code Review in terms of new architecture features and performance improvements.

More detailed information about the NFD release

The NFD Team.

NDNcomm 2014: 1st NDN community meeting

We are pleased to announce the first NDNcomm meeting, hosted by UCLA on September 4-5, 2014. This two-day meeting, the first in a series of meetings, will provide an opportunity to discuss existing capabilities and potential opportunities for the NDN software platform to serve the scientific research community.

Our goals for this meeting are (to be refined based on community input):

  1. elaborate on the current state of the NDN software platform and supporting libraries and applications
  2. describe state of current operational NDN testbed, and how to participate
  3. showcase external research using the NDN software platform and testbed
  4. debate existing and proposed functionality to support security and privacy at different layers of the architecture
  5. share examples of educational use of NDN, including tutorial material
  6. provide a forum to guide the evolution of the NDN architecture, key implementation artifacts including APIs, and to provide feedback proposing potential changes based on implementation and deployment experience
  7. discuss a vision/roadmap for the community interested in advancing NDN deployment and usability, and how to accelerate deployment, both from research and commercial perspectives
  8. provide an opportunity for interested members of the community to engage in hands-on-training to use NDN software or testbed platforms

If you think you are interested in participating, see the NDNcomm 2014 page for more details and registration.

Named Data Networking Next Phase (NDN-NP)

We are pleased to note that the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) just announced its support for the next phase of the Future Internet Architecture projects (“Moving towards a more robust, secure and agile Internet”). This next round of funding will allow the NDN-NP Project to further develop, test and deploy our novel Internet architecture.

Below is the project summary we submitted with our proposal on 7 June 2013:

Project Summary

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a Future Internet Architecture inspired by years of empirical research into network usage and a growing awareness of persistently unsolved problems of the current Internet (IP) architecture. Its central premise is that the Internet is primarily used as an information distribution network, a use that is not a good match for IP, and that the future Internet’s “thin waist” should be based on named data rather than numerically addressed hosts.


This project continues research on NDN started in 2010 under NSF’s FIA program. It applies the project team’s increasingly sophisticated understanding of NDN’s opportunities and challenges to two national priorities–Health IT and Cyberphysical Systems–to further the evolution of the architecture in the experimental, application-driven manner that proved successful in the first three years. In particular, our research agenda is organized to translate important results in architecture and security into library code that guides development for these environments and other key applications toward native NDN designs. It simultaneously continues fundamental research into the challenges of global scalability and broad opportunities for architectural innovation opened up by “simply” routing and forwarding data based on names.

Our research agenda includes: (1) Application design, exploring naming and application design patterns, support for rendezvous, discovery and bootstrapping, the role and design of in-network storage, and use of new data synchronization primitives; (2) Security and trustworthiness, providing basic building blocks of key management, trust management, and encryption-based access control for the new network, as well as anticipating and mitigating future security challenges faced in broad deployment; (3) Routing and forwarding strategy, developing and evaluating path-vector, link-state, and hyperbolic options for inter-domain routing, creating overall approaches to routing security and trust, as well as designing flexible forwarding and mobility support; (4) Scalable forwarding, aiming to support real-world deployment, evaluation and adoption via an operational, scalable forwarding platform; (5) Library and tool development, developing reference implementations for client APIs, trust and security, and new network primitives based on the team’s fundamental results, as well as supporting internal prototype development and external community efforts; (6) Social and economic impacts, considering the specific questions faced in our network environments as well as broader questions that arise in considering a “World on NDN.”

We choose Mobile Health and Enterprise Building Automation and Management Systems as specific instances of Health IT and Cyberphysical Systems to validate the architecture as well as drive new research. Domain experts for the former will be the Open mHealth team, a non-profit patient-centric ecosystem for mHealth, led by Deborah Estrin (Cornell) and Ida Sim (UCSF). For the latter, our experts will be UCLA Facilities Management, operators of the second largest Siemens building monitoring system on the West Coast. To guide our research on the security dimensions of these important environments and the NDN architecture more generally, we have convened a Security Advisory Council (NDN-SAC) to complement our own security and trust effort.

Intellectual Merit

The NDN architecture builds on lessons learned from the success of the IP architecture, preserving principles of the thin waist, hierarchical names, and the end-to-end principle. The design reflects a recognition of the major shift in the applications communication model: from the “where” (i.e., the host/location) to the “what” (i.e., the content). Architecting a communications infrastructure around this shift can radically simplify application designs to allow applications to communicate directly using the name of the content they desire and leave to the network to figure out how and where to retrieve it. NDN also recognizes that the biggest weakness in the current Internet architecture is lack of security, and incorporates a fundamental building block to improve security by requiring that all content be cryptographically signed.

Broader Impacts

The success of new architectures requires broad community involvement and uptake. NDN has built significant momentum through commitment to an open source model that has spurred substantial research activity in both architecture and current implementation. Project members are often invited to present at “future Internet” meetings around the world, and we have performed two high-visibility demos of NDN’s ability to handle large scale distribution. Industry is also showing increasing interest in NDN. Finally, NDN has also had a significant impact on our students, yielding several current Ph.D. theses on NDN topics, industry internships involving NDN research, and graduate and undergraduate curriculum material that offer a comprehensive alternative to IP to stimulate discussion of what network architecture design really means.

NDN for humans

In an attempt to lower the barriers to understanding this revolutionary (as well as evolutionary) way of looking at networking, three recently posted documents are likely to answer many of your questions (and inspire a few more):

(1) Almost 5 years ago, Van gave a 3+ hour tutorial on Content-Centric Networking for the Future Internet Summer School (FISS 09) hosted by the University of Bremen in Germany. We finally extracted an approximate transcript of this goldmine and are making it available, along with pointers to the slides and (4-part) video of his tutorial hosted by U. Bremen.

(Our FAQ answers the commonly asked question of How does NDN differ from Content-Centric Networking (CCN))

(2) A short (8-page) technical report, Named Data Networking, introducing the Named Data Networking architecture. (A version of this report will appear soon in ACM Computer Communications Review.)

(3) Another technical report exploring he potential social impacts of NDN: A World on NDN: Affordances & Implications of the Named Data Networking Future Internet Architecture. This paper highlights four departures from today’s TCP/IP architecture, which underscore the social impacts of NDN: the architecture’s emphases on enabling semantic classification, provenance, publication, and decentralized communication. These changes from TCP/IP could expand affordances for free speech, and produce positive outcomes for security, privacy and anonymity, but raise new challenges regarding data retention and forgetting. These changes might also alter current corporate and law enforcement content regulation mechanisms by changing the way data is identified, handled, and routed across the Web.

We welcome feedback on these and any NDN publications.

New Packet Format & Forwarder

The NDN team’s efforts in early 2014 are focused on several significant updates that continue to evolve the NDN design towards a mature architecture.

New Packet Format. To facilitate more efficient packet handling, the NDN wire format has been changed from binary XML to type-length-value (TLV).  At the same time, minor updates have been made to the packet fields based on our experience over the last three years. The specification for the new TLV format is posted.   Preliminary library and forwarder support is now available in the v0.3 alpha 1 platform release The NDN testbed will rollover to this format in March.  We welcome comments and questions from the community; please post them to the ndn-interest mailing list.

New Forwarder: NFD. We are developing a new forwarder, NFD, with a modular codebase that will facilitate research experimentation with FIB, PIT, and CS designs, as well as research in the “strategy” used for forwarding in different circumstances.  This forwarder will support the new TLV format. We are aiming for a functional alpha (announced to ndn-interest) in March, which will be bundled with supporting libraries and components into an updated platform release (v0.3) in April. Information about the NFD  design and implementation effort can be found on the project’s redmine site.