Cisco takes CCN back to the “community”
Cisco has recently started a new open-source project within the FD.IO community in the Linux Foundation: CICN.
The name stands for Community ICN and reflects the main goal of the project: foster the convergence of various ICN flavors (CCN and NDN) into a single harmonized version of ICN.
And Cisco seems to have a pretty clear plan to achieve that. The first step was acquiring the CCN code base from PARC, now freely released as part of the CICN project.
In addition, the CICN code development follows the specifications released by the IRTF ICN Research Group.
Focus on applications and experiments
But the project is not limited to the architectural code: several tools and plugins are also included, that will speed up the development of ICN application and experiments.
A special attention deserves the VPP forwarder plugin, an ICN forwarder that uses the VPP platform by Cisco and released as open-source as part of FD.IO too.
Early release of the CICN project targets Linux, Android and Apple systems, and includes:
- METIS, the socket based forwarder,
- The VPP forwarder plugin,
- The consumer/producer API,
- The consumer/producer API,
- A number of supported libraries,
- Examples of CCB applications, including but not limited to an end-to-end example for HTTP ABR video delivery (player and server),
- Tools suitable to assist the development and testing phase.
How to contribute
The community is invited to be actively involved in the evolution of the project using the mailing list and participating to weekly web meetings, other than contributing in the project’s code.
More information on the project can be found at http://wiki.fd.io/view/Cicn, with links to the source code repositories, project’s documentation and tutorials.