NFD is a network forwarder that implements and evolves together with the Named Data Networking (NDN) protocol. Since the initial public release in 2014, NFD has been a core component of the NDN Platform.

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.

See docs/INSTALL.rst for compilation and installation instructions.

Extensive documentation is available on NFD's homepage.

Bug reports and feedback are highly appreciated and can be submitted through the NFD issue tracker or the ndn-interest mailing list.

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 (see 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.

If you are new to the NDN software community, please read README-dev.md and the Contributor's Guide to get started.

NFD is a free and open-source software package licensed under the GPL version 3 and is the centerpiece of our committement to making NDN's core technology free and open to all Internet users and developers. For more information about licensing, refer to COPYING.md.