For complete documentation, including step-by-step installation instructions and tutorials, please visit the NFD 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.