Named Data Networking
Lixia Zhang
Alexander Afanasyev
Jeffrey Burke
Van Jacobson
UCLA
kc claffy
CAIDA
UC, San Diego
Patrick Crowley
Washington University,
St. Louis
Christos Papadopoulos
Colorado State Univ.
Lan Wang
Univ. of Memphis
Beichuan Zhang
Univ. of Arizona
ABSTRACT
Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of five projects funded
by the U.S. National Science Foundation under its Future
Internet Architecture Program. NDN has its roots in an
earlier project, Content-Centric Networking (CCN), which
Van Jacobson first publicly presented in 2006.
1
The NDN
project investigates Jacobson’s proposed evolution from to-
day’s host-centric network architecture (IP) to a data-centric
network architecture (NDN). This conceptually simple shift
has far-reaching implications for how we design, develop,
deploy, and use networks and applications. We describe the
motivation and vision of this new architecture, and its basic
components and operations. We also provide a snapshot of
its current design, development status, and research chal-
lenges. More information about the project, including pro-
totype implementations, publications, and annual reports,
is available on named-data.net.
1. VISION: A NEW NARROW WAIST
Today’s Internet’s hourglass architecture centers on a uni-
versal network layer (i.e., IP) which implements the minimal
functionality necessary for global interconnectivity. This
thin waist enabled the Internet’s explosive growth by al-
lowing both lower and upper layer technologies to innovate
independently. However, IP was designed to create a com-
munication network, where packets named only communi-
cation 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 more general than communication
networks, and solving distribution problems via a point-to-
point communication protocol is complex and error-prone.
The Named Data Networking (NDN) project proposed an
evolution of the IP architecture that generalizes the role of
this thin waist, such that packets can name objects other
than communication endpoints (Figure 1). More specifi-
cally, NDN changes the semantics of network service from
delivering the packet to a given destination address to fetch-
ing data identified by a given name. The name in an NDN
packet can name 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
1
“A New Way to Look at Networking”,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCZMoY3q2uM
IP
packets
email WWW phone ...
SMTP HTTP RTP ...
TCP UDP ...
ethernet PPP ...
copper fiber radio ...
CSMA async sonet ...
Every node
copper fiber radio ...
Individual apps
Individual links
Strategy
Security
File Stream ...
browser chat ...
Content
chunks
IP UDP P2P BCast ...
Figure 1: The main building blocks of the NDN ar-
chitecture are named content chunks, in contrast to
the IP architecture’s fundamental unit of communi-
cation, which is an end-to-end channel between two
end endpoints identified by IP addresses.
use almost all of the Internet’s well-tested engineering prop-
erties to solve a much broader range of problems including
not only end-to-end communications but also content dis-
tribution and control problems. Based on three decades of
experience with the strengths and limitations of the current
Internet architecture, the design also builds in security prim-
itives (via signatures on all named data) and self-regulation
of network traffic (via flow balance between Interest and
Data packets). The architecture includes functionality de-
signed to be conducive to user choice and competition as
the network evolves, such as multipath forwarding and in-
network storage.
NDN is one instance of a more general network research di-
rection called information-centric networking (ICN), under
which different architecture designs have emerged [29]. The
Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) established an ICN re-
search working group in 2012
2
. In this paper we provide a
brief (and necessarily incomplete) snapshot of the current
state of the NDN architecture research project, which in-
cludes sixteen NSF-funded principal investigators at twelve
campuses, and growing interest from the academic and in-
dustrial research communities. A more complete description
of recent activities is in the third annual project report [20]
and on the NDN web site (named-data.net).
2
http://trac.tools.ietf.org/group/irtf/trac/wiki/icnrg
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
Volume 44, Number 3, July 2014