The Named Data Networking - NDN

The NDN aims to develop an architecture that can capitalize on strengths and address weaknesses of the internet’s current architecture.

The Named Data Networking (NDN) project aims to develop an 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. 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 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. By naming data instead of their locations, it transforms data into a first-class entity. The project uses end-to-end testbed deployments, simulation, and theoretical analysis to evaluate the proposed architecture, and develops 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.