FAQ

• How does Mini-NDN work?

Mini-NDN’s principles of operation most heavily rely on the underlying Mininet code it relies on. Mininet uses a combination of limited containerization via network namespaces (which give processes isolated interfaces and routing tables) and emulated ethernet connections via veth connections. In practical terms, Mini-NDN ensures that processes running on distinct nodes will run seperately and without interfering with each other.

• How does Mini-NDN apply link loss/delay/etc.?

Mini-NDN relies on Mininet’s code, which in turn uses the Linux tc utility on a stations’ virtualized interfaces to apply configurations known as qdiscs to these links. Note that these will only be applied on egress packets from a station where it’s applied. For more information on qdiscs and tc, view the information here.

• Why use Mini-NDN rather than a simulator such as ndnSIM?

Mini-NDN is easier and faster to use because, rather than serving as a mathematical model of a network, it is instead running real NDN code on a real Linux kernel. This also means it’s quite useful for testing code changes, as it can more accurately test the interaction of software componenents.

Criteria	Mini-NDN	ndnSIM
Based On	Mininet	ns-3
Language	Python	C++
Library/Forwarder/Applications	Use system binaries (free to use any compatible versions)	Integrated (fixed release version)
Application language	C++ (ndn-cxx), CCL (ndn-cpp, PyNDN, ndn-js, jNDN)	C++ (ndn-cxx)
Simulation size	Medium - Large (cluster edition in development)	Large (can be parallelized using MPI)
Simulation time	Real time	Quick (depending on size/memory)
Porting real applications	Drop in	Changes required
Interactivity	Can interact directly with NFD, NLSR or Apps	Can show stats while running
Logs	May need to manually setup to collect	Available with tracer
Post processing scripts	Not available, users need to write their own	Available to use to process the logs
Other	Not yet supported (Wifi in development)	WiFi, LTE, etc available from ns-3