Chronosync Protocol

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Lore & Background

NDN has three core concepts that distinguish it from other network architectures. First, applications name data and data names will directly be used in network packet forwarding; consumer applications would request desired data by its name, so communications in NDN are consumer-driven. Second, NDN communications are secured in a data-centric manner wherein each piece of data (called a Data packet) will be cryptographically signed by its producer and sensitive payload or name components can also be encrypted for the purpose of privacy. Third, NDN adopts a stateful forwarding plane where forwarders will keep a state for each data request (called an Interest packet), and erase the state when a corresponding data packet comes back. NDN's stateful forwarding allows intelligent forwarding strategies, and eliminates loops.

In Their Own Story

The philosophy behind NDN was pioneered by Ted Nelson in 1979, and later by Brent Baccala in 2002. In 1999, the TRIAD project at Stanford proposed avoiding DNS lookups by using the name of an object to route towards a close replica of it. In 2006, the Data-Oriented Network Architecture (DONA) project at UC Berkeley and ICSI proposed a content-centric network architecture, which improved TRIAD by incorporating security (authenticity) and persistence as first-class primitives in the architecture. Van Jacobson gave a Google Talk, A New Way to Look at Networking, in 2006 on the evolution of the network, and argued that NDN was the next step. In 2009, PARC announced their content-centric architecture within the CCNx project, which was led by Jacobson who was a research fellow at PARC at the time. On 21 September 2009, PARC published the specifications for interoperability and released an initial open source implementation (under GPL) of the Content-Centric Networking research project on the Project CCNx site.

Reader's Guide

NDN includes sixteen NSF-funded principal investigators at twelve campuses, and growing interest from the academic and industrial research communities. More than 30 institutions form a global testbed. There exists a large body of research and an actively growing code base contributed to NDN. The NDN forwarder is currently supported on Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04, Fedora 20+, CentOS 6+, Gentoo Linux, Raspberry Pi, OpenWRT, FreeBSD 10+, and several other platforms. Common client libraries are actively supported for C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, .NET Framework (C#), and Squirrel programming languages. The NDN-LITE is a lightweight NDN library designed for IoT networks and constrained devices. NDN-LITE is being actively developed and so far, NDN-LITE has been adapted to POSIX, RIOT OS, NRF boards. An NDN simulator and emulator are also available and actively developed. Several client applications are being developed in the areas of real-time conferencing, NDN friendly file systems, chat, file sharing, and IoT.

Did You Know?

• Van Jacobson first publicly presented Content-Centric Networking (CCN) in 2006.
• The NDN project includes sixteen NSF-funded principal investigators at twelve campuses.
• More than 30 institutions form a global testbed for NDN.
• NDN-LITE is a lightweight NDN library designed for IoT networks and constrained devices.
• The philosophy behind NDN was pioneered by Ted Nelson in 1979.