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Why Ownly does not Work on the ndn6 Network? A Decade of Policy-Blind Routing

Junxiao Shi

Stardate 1481.6, Antwerp. Three friends opened Ownly, the flagship NDN application developed and published by UCLA Internet Research Laboratory. They started typing into the decentralized collaborative editor, but one of them cannot see the edits. They checked the connection: 📶 online. They checked the prefix registration: ✅ successful. However, the document will not sync.

What worked seamlessly in a UCLA lab failed in the wild because of a missing feature in the routing protocol. This article moves beyond the #2856 confinement issue in the last episode and identifies additional gaps that prevent applications from working across autonomous system boundaries. In particular, we assume a relaxed prefix registration policy that allows the Ownly application to register its desired prefixes in both the global NDN testbed and the ndn6 network, and explore what other features are necessary in order to enable the sync-based communication patterns.

Inter-Domain Routing Built on Grep and Hope

I currently operate two global-scale networks: AS200690 and ndn6.

  • AS200690 is an IPv6-only network registered with RIPE NCC. I have eight routers connected with each other via WireGuard or GRE tunnels. Each router runs the BIRD Internet Routing Daemon in a KVM server.
  • ndn6 is an independent NDN network. I have six routers connected via UDP tunnels over IPv6. Each router runs the NDN Forwarding Daemon (NFD) and NDN Link State Routing (NLSR) in Docker containers.
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Why Ownly does not Work on the ndn6 Network? A Decade of #2856

Junxiao Shi
last updated

Christmas week 2024, Sydney. A user opened Ownly (then called NDN Workspace), the flagship NDN application developed and published by UCLA Internet Research Laboratory. Her laptop could reach the network, but it couldn't publish. Every attempt to register a prefix was met with a blunt "403 prefix-disallowed" error.

What worked seamlessly in a UCLA lab failed in the wild because of a collision between competing network philosophies. This article looks back on operations of two NDN networks under different philosophies, analyzes why the Ownly application is incompatible with one of the networks. Then I present the lessons learned and identify the practical gaps on why NDN is not ready for transitioning from a "UCLA experiment" to a "global Internet".

ndn6 Network and NDN-FCH 2021

Since 2021, I (re)started operating the ndn6 network, my own global scale NDN network. The ndn6 network is connected to the global NDN testbed but not a part of it. It's an independent network that conforms to the NDN protocol, but has its own routing protocol and prefix registration policies.

The same year, I participated in the NDN-FCH: The Big Rewriteâ„¢ project at the 11th NDN Hackathon, during which I led a team to build a new version of "Find Closest Hub" service:

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NDN Video Streaming on the ndn6 Network

Junxiao Shi

The ndn6 network, my own global scale Named Data Networking network, came back earlier this year. I moved my NDNts video streaming app into the ndn6 network, to reduce dependency on the NDN testbed. How well is it performing?

QUIC ⇒ HTTP/3

In my last article "NDN video streaming over QUIC", I used Chrome browser's experimental QuicTransport feature to perform video streaming over Named Data Networking. The analysis revealed that QUIC transport was generally performing better than WebSockets in this application, according to metrics including video resolution and startup latency.

Web technologies are constantly evolving. QuicTransport was in Origin Trial status at the time, but it was discontinued as of Chrome 91. WebTransport was introduced in its place. The main difference is that, WebTransport uses HTTP/3 as the underlying network protocol, while QuicTransport uses QUIC datagrams.

Since HTTP/3 runs over QUIC, I expect no performance difference between the two. I promptly registered for the WebTransport Origin Trial, and updated my gateways and NDNts libraries to use the new API.

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Return of the ndn6 Network

Junxiao Shi

In 2014, I installed NDN Forwarding Daemon (NFD) router on a tiny 128MB virtual machine. I named this node ndn6: IPv6 NDN router, because the virtual machine, purchased from the original Low End Spirit forum for €3.00/year, was an IPv6-primary service. I idled this router for three years, and then shut it down in 2017.

I created NDNts: NDN libraries for the modern web in 2019. Since then, I have been publishing my own content over Named Data Networking, most prominently the NDN push-ups. NDNts does not require a local forwarder, so that I operated video repositories by directly connecting to a nearby testbed router via UDP tunnel. Shortly after, I started experimenting with QUIC transport, which involved deploying several NDN-QUIC gateways to translate between NFD's plain UDP packets and Chrome's QUIC transport protocol.

One day, I realized: my content is sent to the global NDN testbed, and then retrieved back to my servers for delivery to browsers over QUIC. My video repository in Buffalo and NDN-QUIC gateway in Montreal are quite close to each other, but the packets are taking a detour to Boston, increasing latency by at least 10ms. Also, since I statically assign a testbed router for each application, a downtime of that router would bring my application offline as well. I thought, instead of operating isolated applications and gateways, I should setup my own NDN network.

Setting up a new NDN network is no small feat. NFD and NLSR implement forwarding and routing, but I also need to:

  • Decide on a topology between different routers.
  • Assign a name prefix to each router.
  • Install and update software in each router.
  • Generate configuration files for NFD and NLSR, and modify them as the topology changes.
  • Monitor the network and know about ongoing problems.
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