Archives for testbed

How to Deploy the NDN Forwarding Daemon on a Low-End Box

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a potential future Internet architecture designed as a distribution network. To access the NDN network from a Linux or Apple OSX machine, one can install the NDN Platform, a collection of software packages including the protocol stack and critical applications. The NDN Forwarding Daemon (NFD), a core component of the architecture, serves as a software router and runs both on the network routers as well as on end hosts to communicate with routers.

The NDN team provides periodic releases of the new platform, and binary packages are provided with each platform release. However, the development of NDN software, including NFD, happens much faster than platform releases, so users can download source code from GitHub. If a user wants to run bleeding edge software, those packages must be built from source code.

As a geeky low end box user, I’m thinking: can I run the NDN platform on a Linux box with only a small amount of memory? The box I’m talking about is an OpenVZ container from LowEndSpirit UK location, with only 128MB memory and no swap space. To make the challenge more interesting, I want to avoid apt-get, and run the bleeding edge version built from source code.
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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.

NDN Project 2012-2013 Annual Report

We finally published our annual report covering our activities from Sept 2012 through August 2013.  We excerpt the executive summary here, for the entire report see http://named-data.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ndn-annualreport2012-2013.pdf:

Today’s Internet’s hourglass architecture centers on a universal network layer (i.e., IP) which implements the minimal functionality necessary for global interconnectivity. This thin waist enabled the Internet’s
explosive growth by allowing both lower and upper layer technologies to innovate independently. However, IP was designed to create a communication network, where packets named only communication endpoints. Sustained growth in e-commerce, digital media, social networking, and smartphone applications has led to dominant use of the Internet as a distribution network. Distribution networks are fundamentally more general than communication networks, and solving distribution problems via a point-to-point communication protocol is complex and error-prone.

The NDN project proposes an evolution of the IP architecture that generalizes the role of this thin waist, such that packets can name objects other than communication endpoints. The name in an NDN packet can be anything — an endpoint, a data chunk in a movie or a book, a command to turn on some lights, etc. This conceptually simple change allows NDN networks to use almost all of the Internet’s well-tested engineering properties to solve not only end-to-end communication problems but also content distribution and control problems. Based on three decades of experience with the strengths and limitations of the current Internet architecture, the design also builds in fundamental security primitives (via signatures on all named data) and self-regulation of network traffic (via flow balance between Interest and Data packets). We recognize that any new architecture must be incrementally deployable over the current Internet, and we explicitly consider factors that will facilitate user choice and competition as the network evolves.
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