NFD overview, release notes for the released versions, getting started tutorial, and other additional documentation are available online on NFD's homepage.
NFD is a network forwarder that implements and evolves together with the Named Data Networking (NDN) protocol. After the initial release, NFD will become a core component of the NDN Platform and will follow the same release cycle.
NFD is an open and free software package licensed under GPL 3.0 license and is the centerpiece of our committement to making NDN's core technology open and free to all Internet users and developers. For more information about the licensing details and limitation, refer to COPYING.md.
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, new 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.
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.
As of release 0.1.0, we are providing NFD binaries for the supported platforms, which are the preferred installation method of NFD:
Next releases would include support for other platforms. Please send us feedback on the platforms you're using, so we can prioritize our goals. We would also appreciate if someone can provide help with packaging the current NFD release for other platforms.
Besides simplicity of installation, the binary release includes automatic initial configuration and platform-specific tools to automatically start NFD and related daemons. In particular, on OSX NFD is controlled using launchd and on Ubuntu using upstart mechanisms. In both cases, nfd-start and nfd-stop scripts are convenience wrappers for launchd and upstart.
The source code and source-code installation instructions are always available on NFD's homepage:
Besides officially supported platforms, NFD is known to work on: Fedora 20, CentOS 6, Raspberry Pi, OpenWRT, FreeBSD 10.0, and several other platforms. We are soliciting help with documenting common problems / pitfalls in installing/using NFD on different platforms on NFD WiKi.