Named Data Networking (NDN) project

The Internet has been a huge success, but the world has changed dramatically since it was created. The Internet architecture is no longer a good match to its primary use, so how do we design a new architecture that addresses todays problems and will take us into the future with even greater success than the past? Our answer is conceptually simple: generalize the Internet architecture by replacing the focus on where endpoint addresses of hosts with what identifiers of the content that users and applications care about. In this report, we have proposed a new Internet architecture called Named Data Networking (NDN) based on this simple change. We have sketched an initial blueprint of this new NDN architecture, and identified a core set of research problems that must be investigated in order to develop and validate it. These intellectual challenges include scalability of routing on names, fast forwarding based on variable length hierarchical names (including per-packet state updates needed for multipath forwarding and caching), efficiency of signatures for finely-granular signing and verification, usable trust models for data-centric security, network security and 18 defense, content protection and privacy, and fundamental communication theory that incorporates memory as an explicit part of the communication model.

Citation

Zhang, L.; Estrin, D.; Burke, J.; Jacobson, V.; Thornton, J. D.; Smetters, D. K.; Zhang, B.; Tsudik, G.; claffy, k.; Krioukov, D.; Massey, D.; Papadopoulos, C.; Abdelzaher, T.; Wang, L.; Crowley, P.; Yeh, E. Named Data Networking (NDN) project, PARC TR-2010-3; 2010 October.