The Named Data Networking project recently published the NDN-NP annual report covering activities from May 2015 through April 2016.).

V. Jacobson, J. Burke, L. Zhang, T. Abdelzaher, B. Zhang, k. claffy, P. Crowley, J. Halderman, C. Papadopoulos, and L. Wang, “Named Data Networking Next Phase (NDN-NP) Project May 2015 – April 2016 Annual Report”, Tech. rep., Named Data Networking (NDN), Jun 2016.

This report summarizes our accomplishments during the second year of the Named Data Networking Next Phase (NDN-NP) project (the 5th year of the overall project. This phase of the project focuses on deploying and evaluating the NDN architecture in four environments: building automation management systems, mobile health, multimedia real-time conferencing tools, and scientific data applications. Implementation and testing of pilot applications in these network environments further demonstrated our research progress in namespace design, trust management, and encryption-based access control. Highlights from this year include:

1. Continued evolution the NDN Forwarding Daemon (NFD), to support application-driven experimentation with new NDN protocol features.
2. Development of an Android version of NFD to promote NDN experimentation on mobile platforms.
3. Implementation of a new transport protocol (InfoMax) that can intelligently filter streams of information in order to reduce transmitted data volume, while minimizing loss of information.
4. A growing portfolio of supporting software libraries, including new APIs, transport mechanisms (Sync, information maximization), and security functionality, that leverage inherent capabilities of NDN, e.g., schematized trust, name-based access control.
5. Demonstration of extremely scalable forwarding implementation using a billion synthetic names.
6. Implementation and evaluation of hyperbolic routing
   performance to understand its feasibility in supporting NDN’s
   interdomain routing.

7. Multi-faceted evaluation of the architecture, from
   instrumentation of applications on the testbed, to uses of ndnSIM and the Mini-NDN emulator environment.

8. Continued uses of NDN in the four courses taught by principal investigators.
9. The second annual NDN Community meeting hosted by the
   NDN Consortium to promote a vibrant open source ecosystem of
   research and experimentation around NDN.

The NDN team has made tremendous progress in the last five years, and a larger community of information-centric networking research has evolved in parallel. Our progress revealed the importance of demonstrating NDN capabilities in IoT and big data environments, and highlighted the need for accessible software platform support and emulation capabilities to facilitate R\&D on both the NDN architecture and applications that leverage it. We have received a year of supplement funding to complete four tasks: 1) completing and disseminating native NDN applications and associated design patterns, 2) demonstrating NDN scalability; 3) documenting and releasing reference implementations, and 4) documenting NDN design decisions and lessons learned.

The report for the Second NDN Community Meeting (NDNcomm 2015) is available online now. The meeting, held at UCLA in Los Angeles, California on September 28-29, 2015, provided a platform for attendees from 63 institutions across 13 countries to exchange recent NDN research and development results, to debate existing and proposed functionality in NDN forwarding, routing, and security, and to provide feedback to the NDN architecture design evolution.

[The workshop was partially supported by the National Science Foundation CNS-1345286, CNS-1345318, and CNS-1457074. We thank the NDNcomm Program Committee members for their effort of putting together an excellent program. We thank all participants for their insights and feedback at the workshop.]

The report for the 1st NDN Community Meeting (NDNcomm) is available online now. This report, “The First Named Data Networking Community Meeting (NDNcomm)“, is a brief summary of the first NDN Community Meeting held at UCLA in Los Angeles, California on September 4-5, 2014. The meeting provided a platform for the attendees from 39 institutions across seven countries to exchange their recent NDN research and development results, to debate existing and proposed functionality in security support, and to provide feedback into the NDN architecture design evolution.

The workshop was supported by the National Science Foundation CNS-1457074, CNS-1345286, and CNS-1345318. We thank the NDNcomm Program Committee members for their effort of putting together an excellent program. We thank all participants for their insights and feedback at the workshop.

Today I participated as a panelist in the Internet Regulation 2020 hosted by Duke Law’s Center for Innovation Policy at the National Academy of Sciences. The questions for my panel were:

What are the most significant realistic changes in network architecture, capacity, and connectivity by 2020? In what ways might these developments be affected, perhaps even precluded, by regulatory policy? In what ways might these developments in turn affect regulatory policy? What are the costs and benefits of these developments and their possible regulation?

My slides (which link to related reading on last slide):

http://www.caida.org/publications/presentations/2014/internet_architecture_innovation_duke/

From the executive summary of public comment to FCC GN Docket No. 14-28., Approaches to transparency aimed at minimizing harm and maximizing investment (by David Clark, Steve Bauer, and kc claffy):

Embedded in a challenging legal and historical context, the FCC must act in the short term to address concerns about harmful discriminatory behavior. But its actions should be consistent with an effective, long-term approach that might ultimately reflect a change in legal framing and authority. In this comment we do not express a preference among short-term options, e.g., section 706 vs. Title II. Instead we suggest steps that would support any short-term option chosen by the FCC, but also inform debate about longer term policy options. Our suggestions are informed by recent research on Internet connectivity structure and performance, from technical as well as business perspectives, and our motivation is enabling fact-based policy. Our line of reasoning is as follows.

1. Recent discourse about Internet regulation has focused on whether or how to regulate discrimination rather than on its possible harms and benefits. For four reasons, we advocate explicit attention to possible harms, their causes, and means to prevent them. First, the court has stated that while the FCC cannot ban traffic discrimination unless it reclassifies Internet access providers under Title II, the FCC does have the authority to remedy harms. Second, a focus on harms provides a possible way to govern specialized services, which are currently not subject to traffic management constraints. Third, if the FCC chooses Title II, it will open up many questions about which parts to enforce, which will require a discussion of the harms vs. benefits of selective forbearance. Fourth, any new regulatory framework would be well-served by a thorough understanding of
   potential harms and benefits that result from behavior of various actors.

(more…)

On 19-20 May 2014, the NSF Computer and Network Systems (CNS) Core Programs hosted a kickoff meeting in Washington D.C. for the next phase of the Future Internet Architectures Program. The program funds three projects for an additional two years each to create and demonstrate prototype implementations of their architecture protocol suites and test and evaluate them in one or more relevant application environments. The meeting allowed the projects to present overviews of their architectures and the environments in which they plan to test them, as well as their thoughts on how their architecture may shift the balance of power among players in the Internet ecosystem, and other ideas on how to evaluate their architecture’s benefits and incentives to deploy. CAIDA participates in the Named-Data Networking Project (NDN), one of the three projects that receive funding from the FIA NP Program. The NDN team’s presentations at this meeting are posted at http://named-data.net/publications/presentations/.

Recently posted to the Named-Data Networking site:

In an attempt to lower the barriers to understanding this revolutionary (as well as evolutionary) way of looking at networking, three recently posted documents are likely to answer many of your questions (and inspire a few more):

(1) Almost 5 years ago, Van gave a 3+ hour tutorial on Content-Centric Networking for the Future Internet Summer School (FISS 09) hosted by the University of Bremen in Germany. We finally extracted an approximate transcript of this goldmine and are making it available, along with pointers to the slides and (4-part) video of his tutorial hosted by U. Bremen.

(Our FAQ answers the commonly asked question of How does NDN differ from Content-Centric Networking (CCN))

(2) A short (8-page) technical report, Named Data Networking, introducing the Named Data Networking architecture. (A version of this report will appear soon in ACM Computer Communications Review.)

(3) Another technical report exploring he potential social impacts of NDN: A World on NDN: Affordances & Implications of the Named Data Networking Future Internet Architecture. This paper highlights four departures from today’s TCP/IP architecture, which underscore the social impacts of NDN: the architecture’s emphases on enabling semantic classification, provenance, publication, and decentralized communication. These changes from TCP/IP could expand affordances for free speech, and produce positive outcomes for security, privacy and anonymity, but raise new challenges regarding data retention and forgetting. These changes might also alter current corporate and law enforcement content regulation mechanisms by changing the way data is identified, handled, and routed across the Web.

We welcome feedback on these and any NDN publications.

[This blog entry is guest written by Robert Beverly at the Naval Postgraduate School.]

In many respects, the deployment, adoption, use, and performance of IPv6 has received more recent attention than IPv4. Certainly the longitudinal measurement of IPv6, from its infancy to the exhaustion of ICANN v4 space to native 1% penetration (as observed by Google), is more complete than IPv4. Indeed, there are many vested parties in (either the success or failure) of IPv6, and numerous IPv6 measurement efforts afoot.

Researchers from Akamai, CAIDA, ICSI, NPS, and MIT met in early January, 2013 to firstly share and make sense of current measurement initiatives, while secondly plotting a path forward for the community in measuring IPv6. A specific objective of the meeting was to understand which aspects of IPv6 measurement are “done” (in the sense that there exists a sound methodology, even if measurement should continue), and which IPv6 questions/measurements remain open research problems. The meeting agenda and presentation slides are archived online.

(more…)

I kicked off 2012 with a visit to Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO to attend the principal investigators (PI) retreat for the Named Data Networking Project, one of four projects funded under NSF’s “Future Internet Architecture” (FIA) program. Impressive progress since the first FIA meeting, with substantial development and coordination of the NDN Testbed connecting the initial participating institutions, including network status reporting, state of (phase-one) OSPF routing, and testbed status pages. This two-day meeting packed in a wide range of collaborative discussions of architecture and implementation issues, including: topology and namespace structure and constraints; organizational structure and network management; routing and forwarding strategy; security issues such as attribution and privacy; early experiences with application development; evaluation and measurement; social and ethical values in technology design; and educational outreach (classes teaching NDN concepts). We also discussed how to dispel the misconception that NDN is simply collaborative web caching. (The caching is essential but the most revolutionary piece of this new communication model is retrieving data by names.)

(more…)

Amidst the recent political unrest in the Middle East, researchers have observed significant changes in Internet traffic and connectivity. In this article we tap into a previously unused source of data: unsolicited Internet traffic arriving from Libya. The traffic data we captured shows distinct changes in unsolicited traffic patterns since 17 February 2011.