YaNFD - Yet another Named Data Networking Forwarding Daemon

YaNFD is a forwarding daemon for the Named Data Networking platform written in Go. It is compatible with existing NDN applications and utilizes the management tools and protocols developed for the NFD forwarder.

Prerequisites

YaNFD requires Go 1.23 or later. Besides that, you will need libpcap and g++ on Linux and MacOS. On Ubuntu, these libraries can be installed by:

sudo apt install build-essential pkg-config libpcap-dev

You may refer to this if you want to build a Docker image.

YaNFD has been developed and tested on Linux (namely, Ubuntu). However, we have designed it with support for Windows, macOS, and BSD in mind. We have received reports that YaNFD operates properly on Windows 10 (with minor changes -- see below) and macOS, but this has not been evaluated by the developers.

Installation

Install the YaNFD binary

go install github.com/named-data/YaNFD/cmd/yanfd@latest

Install YaNFD from Windows Store

Get it from: https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9NBK3ZJT4CL8

Install the configuration file

On MacOS/Linux

curl -o ./yanfd.toml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/named-data/YaNFD/master/yanfd.toml.sample
mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/ndn
install -m 644 ./yanfd.toml /usr/local/etc/ndn
rm ./yanfd.toml

On MacOS, one also needs to change socket_path to /var/run/nfd/nfd.sock in the copied configuration file.

On Windows 10/11

curl -o yanfd.toml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/named-data/YaNFD/master/yanfd.toml.sample
mkdir %APPDATA%\ndn
move yanfd.toml %APPDATA%\ndn\

One needs to change socket_path to ${TEMP}\\nfd\\nfd.sock in the copied configuration file. Also, to execute YaNFD on Windows 10, one needs to explicitly specify the configuration path:

yanfd.exe --config=%APPDATA%\ndn\yanfd.toml

Building from source

Linux, macOS, BSD

To build and install YaNFD on Unix-like platforms, run:

make
sudo make install

Windows 10

To build and install YaNFD on Windows, please run the go build command in the Makefile manually:

go build github.com/named-data/YaNFD/cmd/yanfd

At the moment, you will need to manually install the executable (yanfd.exe) and the configuration file (yanfd.toml.sample) to a location of your choice.

Configuration

YaNFD's configuration is split into two components: startup configuration and runtime configuration. Startup configuration sets default ports, queue sizes, logging levels, and other important options. Meanwhile, runtime configuration is used to create NDN faces, set routes and strategies, and other related tasks.

Startup configuration

Startup configuration for YaNFD is performed via a TOML file, by default read from /usr/local/etc/ndn/yanfd.toml on Unix-like systems. Note that you will need to copy the sample config file installed to /usr/local/etc/ndn/yanfd.toml.sample to this location before running YaNFD for the first time. The configuration options are documented via comments in the sample file.

On Windows, at this time, you will need to specify the location of the configuration file manually when starting YaNFD via the --config argument.

Runtime configuration

Runtime configuration is performed via the NFD Management Protocol. At the moment, this requires the installation of the NFD package to obtain the nfdc configuration utility. YaNFD supports the majority of this management protocol, but some features are currently unsupported, such as ContentStore management.

Running

To run YaNFD, run the yanfd (or yanfd.exe) executable. To view a list of available options, specify the --help argument.

After starting YaNFD, you can treat it like NFD from an application and configuration perspective.

Publications

• 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).