NDN Forwarding Daemon

NFD is developed by a community effort. Although the first release was mostly done by the members of NSF-sponsored NDN project team, it already contains significant contributions from people outside the project team (for more details, refer to AUTHORS.md). We strongly encourage participation from all interested parties, since broader community support is key for NDN to succeed as a new Internet architecture. Bug reports and feedback are highly appreciated and can be made through Redmine site and the ndn-interest mailing list.

The main design goal of NFD is to support diverse experimentation of NDN technology. The design emphasizes modularity and extensibility to allow easy experiments with new protocol features, algorithms, and applications. We have not fully optimized the code for performance. The intention is that performance optimizations are one type of experiments that developers can conduct by trying out different data structures and different algorithms; over time, better implementations may emerge within the same design framework. To facilitate such experimentation with the forwarder, the NFD team has also written a developer’s guide, which details the current implementation and provides tips for extending all aspects of NFD.

NFD will keep evolving in three aspects: improvement of the modularity framework, keeping up with the NDN protocol spec, and addition of other new features. We hope to keep the modular framework stable and lean, allowing researchers to implement and experiment with various features, some of which may eventually work into the protocol spec.

The design and development of NFD benefited from our earlier experience with CCNx software package. However, NFD is not in any part derived from CCNx codebase and does not maintain compatibility with CCNx.

• ndn-app
• nfd-dev
• ndn-lib
• ndnSIM

Named Data Networking