YaNFD: Yet another named data networking forwarding daemon

Published in ICN 21, 2021

Recommended citation: Eric Newberry, Xinyu Ma, and Lixia Zhang. 2021. YaNFD: Yet another named data networking forwarding daemon. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 30–41. https://doi.org/10.1145/3460417.3482969

We have developed YaNFD as a new software packet forwarder for NDN. YaNFD achieves compatibility with existing NDN applications and forwarders, as well as high throughput. YaNFD features multi-threaded forwarding, a smaller and more streamlined codebase compared to existing implementations, and can be managed using existing NDN forwarder management utilities and protocols. In this paper, we discuss our implementation, including how it differs from previous forwarders based upon lessons learned during their development and use over the span of multiple years. Additionally, we present the lessons learned from our experience developing a new forwarder for NDN from the ground up.