While the Internet has far exceeded expectations, it has also stretched initial assumptions, often creating tussles that challenge its underlying communication model. Users and applications operate in terms of content, making it increasingly limiting and difficult to conform to IP's requirement to communicate by discovering and specifying location. To carry the Internet into the future, a conceptually simple yet transformational architectural shift is required, from today's focus on where ? addresses and hosts ? to what ? the content that users and applications care about. This project investigates a potential new Internet architecture called Named Data Networking (NDN). NDN capitalizes on strengths ? and addresses weaknesses ? of the Internet's current host-based, point-to-point communication architecture in order to naturally accommodate emerging patterns of communication. By naming data instead of their location, NDN transforms data into a first-class entity. The current Internet secures the data container. NDN secures the contents, a design choice that decouples trust in data from trust in hosts, enabling several radically scalable communication mechanisms such as automatic caching to optimize bandwidth. The project studies the technical challenges that must be addressed to validate NDN as a future Internet architecture: routing scalability, fast forwarding, trust models, network security, content protection and privacy, and fundamental communication theory. The project uses end-to-end testbed deployments, simulation, and theoretical analysis to evaluate the proposed architecture, and is developing specifications and prototype implementations of NDN protocols and applications.
The "consumer Internet" as we know it today is nearly 25 years old and it’s precursor, the "research Internet" dates back to the groundbreaking work creating ARPAnet and Ethernet, both projects are more than forty years old. The Internet has changed our lives, society and culture. We now depend on it for every facet of daily life including entertainment, education and commerce. The Internet is not keeping up with the challenges of the 21st Century: capacity, efficiency, security, privacy, resiliency and operational costs are all worse than society demands or deserves. This is in part due to an architecture that is nearly 50 years old. While this architecture has served society well the demands placed on today’s Internet were not anticipated at the time of the original work. It is imperative to evaluate where we are, what’s technically possible and what’s technically feasible to create a more robust and secure Internet. Our work established the foundation for the Named Data Networking program as one of several future Internet architecture research programs sponsored by NSF. The program has made significant progress in validating the initial idea of replacing Internet addresses (IP addresses are like computer to computer phone numbers) with a ‘name space’ where every object can be accessed by name. We have shown the approach is technically feasible and holds great promise as an Internet architecture for the 21st Century and beyond. Implementation challenges have been identified as well as key areas for future research. Several working proof of concept prototypes have been developed. Our work enabled a global academic and industrial research and development community in Information Centric Networking. Multiple academic and industrial research projects have produced viable prototypes of these concepts that can be evaluated via simulation as well as running systems. To learn more about our implementation of Information Centric Networking please see our website at the following address www dot ccmx dot org (www.ccnx.org).
