Building the Core NDN Infrastructure to Advance Information-Centric Networking Research (NDN-CRI)

This effort aims to build the core infrastructure to support the evaluation, experimentation, and further development of the Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture as a community resource, serving to advance research in the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm.

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a new Internet architecture that replaces today’s architectural focus on “where”, i.e., the addresses and hosts of IP, with “what”, i.e., the content that users and applications care about. This fundamental shift can bring profound impact on enhancing Internet security, enabling mobility support, scaling content distribution, and facilitating application development. NDN has attracted researchers from around the world, both in academia and industry, to explore all aspects of its design, implementation, and applications. It is the most prominent realization of the vision for Information-Centric Networking (ICN), around which a growing research community has formed over the past several years.

A full exploration and examination of future Internet architecture designs like NDN, and ICN more broadly, require working prototypes, evaluation tools, and experimentation platforms, which are the core infrastructure that this project aims to develop. More specifically, building upon our existing NDN research, we propose to develop for the research community more robust, extensible, and well-documented implementations of

• the NDN software forwarder providing core network functionality,
• libraries of essential features to support application development,
• a routing protocol to connect NDN nodes,
• simulator, emulator, lab testbed, and global testbed for realistic evaluations and experimentation,
• demonstration kits, tools, documentations, and tutorials.