CCNxCon2013: News, Highlights, and What’s Next for CCN

PARC recently hosted the third CCNx Community Meeting – CCNxCon 2013 – where many researchers and engineers from academia, research labs, and technology companies joined together at our Palo Alto campus to discuss the future of networking.  We were excited and honored to have participation from those who have been actively working on Content-Centric Networking (CCN) for several years as well as novices who just want to learn what’s the excitement around CCN.

The meeting spanned two full days with a technical program that consisted of talks, posters, and demonstrations – addressing topics ranging from systems issues, routing, forwarding, naming, and security to building cool CCN applications. The technical program and discussions illustrated the fact that CCN has reached a stage of maturity. Many teams have been working with CCN for more than four years. The discussions were engaging and the enthusiasm that surrounds any cool, new disruptive technology was palpable.

Several things at this year’s event stood out for me.  The attitude and belief seems to have shifted from “Can we even make this technology work?” to “Yes, this can work.”  People have been both technically and emotionally vested in CCN for the past several years, so conversations at lunch, as well as during the breaks, were really intense and at the same time very engaging and collaborative.  As a result, the break-time discussions have continued well beyond the community meeting. There are now regular meetings scheduled between different teams to discuss some of the key technical aspects of the CCN protocol and architecture.  To me, this truly signifies the success of the community meeting. The fact that we can get everyone working on this topic in the same room at the same time, get them to share their ideas and current work, actively engage in technical discussions at the meeting, and then continue the collaboration afterwards. This is what the CCNx community meetings are all about.

The highlight of the meeting was the big news that PARC shared with the CCN community. We took the wraps off our year-long hardware collaboration and presented two high-speed CCN-enabled routers. More details about the new hardware will be announced soon, and we’re looking forward to sharing more on this exciting project.

CCN is at an incredible stage right now. The sustained momentum over the past few years has resulted in some amazing innovations. At the same time, we are coming together as a community and using our diverse experiences and lessons learned to work collectively on adoption and deployment of CCN.

To learn more or join the CCNx community, please visit https://www.ccnx.org/.

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