Install

Prerequisites

Mini-NDN is officially supported on the following Linux distributions:

• Ubuntu 20.04

• Ubuntu 22.04 (recommended)

• Ubuntu 24.04

• Debian 11 (WiFi scenario does not work)

• Fedora 33 (WiFi scenario does not work)

You must have sudo privileges to install and run Mini-NDN.

Using Docker

You can use the nightly build from GitHub package registry

docker run -m 4g --cpus=4 -it --privileged \
        -v /lib/modules:/lib/modules \
        ghcr.io/named-data/mini-ndn:master bash

NOTE: This nightly build is only currently supported for x86_64. ARM64 support (i.e. Apple silicon Macs) will be added in the future.

Building your own Docker image

The provided Dockerfile can be used to build an image from scratch. To build with the Dockerfile:

• Clone the repository and type:

  docker build -t minindn .
  

• You can then access the container through shell with:

  docker run -m 4g --cpus=4 -it --privileged \
      -v /lib/modules:/lib/modules \
      minindn bin/bash
  

Additional recommendations

• It is recommended to set reasonable constraints on memory (-m) and CPU cores (–cpus), especially on less powerful or non-dedicated systems.

• –privileged is mandatory for underlying Mininet to utilize the virtual switch

• The root directory on run is /mini-ndn, which contains the installation and examples.

• The GUI may not work for now due to docker and xterm setup issues and is independent from Mini-NDN. If you intend to run the GUI, pass -e DISPLAY -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix to the docker run command.

Using Vagrantfile

With Vagrant installed, simply do vagrant up which will bring up an Ubuntu 18.04 virtual machine and install Mini-NDN and all its dependencies on it. Please make sure to tweak the CPU core count (default 4 cores) and RAM (default 4GB) according to your needs before doing vagrant up. Mini-NDN can be found in /home/vagrant/mini-ndn which is a symlink to /vagrant if Vagrantfile was used from within mini-ndn cloned on the host. Otherwise it is an actual clone of mini-ndn.

Using install.sh

Mini-NDN has the following dependencies:

• NDN Forwarding Daemon (NFD)

• Named Data Link State Routing (NLSR)

• NDN Essential Tools (ndn-tools)

• NDN Traffic Generator

• infoedit

• Mininet

• Mininet-WiFi (optional)

To install Mini-NDN and its dependencies, clone this repository and run:

./install.sh

The script accepts various command line flags. Some notable flags are:

• -y skips interactive confirmation before installation.

• --ppa prefers installing NDN software from named-data PPA. This shortens installation time by downloading binary packages, but is only available on Ubuntu.

• --source prefers installing NDN software from source code.

• --use-existing will only install dependencies not already in the executable path.

• --dummy-keychain patches ndn-cxx to use an in-memory dummy KeyChain, which reduces CPU overhead and allows you to scale up Mini-NDN experiments. Large Mini-NDN experiments would run significantly faster after applying this patch. However, your experiments cannot use any NDN security related features (signatures, verifier, access control, etc).

• --no-wifi skips Mininet-WiFi dependency. Currently Mininet-WiFi only works on Ubuntu, so that you must specify this option when installing on other distros.

You can see all command line flags by running:

./install.sh -h

The script uses setup.py develop to point the system install of Python packages to the codebase directory. Therefore, you can modify mininet, mininet-wifi, and mini-ndn, and the changes will be reflected immediately.

If NDN software is installed from source code (not PPA), the code is downloaded to dl directory under your mini-ndn clone. If you modify the source code, you need to manually recompile and reinstall the software (./waf && sudo ./waf install).

Installing Dependencies

This section outlines how to install dependencies manually. If you used install.sh, you do not need to perform these steps.

Mininet

Mini-NDN is based on Mininet. To install Mininet:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mininet/mininet.git

After Mininet source is on your system, run the following command to install Mininet core dependencies and Open vSwitch:

./util/install.sh -nv

To check if Mininet is working correctly, run this test:

sudo mn --test pingall

This will print out a series of statements that show the test setup and the results of the test. Look for Results: two-thirds of the way down where it will indicate the percentage of dropped packets. Your results should show “0% dropped (2/2 received)”.

NOTE: Mini-NDN, while providing a high level of emulation of hosts, requires programs to be installed onto your computer. It will not work if they are not installed. If you do not want NDN software installed onto your computer, you can use a virtual machine, which can be quite simply set up with the provided Vagrantfile.

NDN dependencies

Each node in Mini-NDN will run the official implementation of NDN installed on your system. The following dependencies are needed:

Mini-NDN uses ndn-cxx, NFD, NLSR, and ndn-tools.

• To install ndn-cxx: https://docs.named-data.net/ndn-cxx/current/INSTALL.html

• To install NFD: https://docs.named-data.net/NFD/current/INSTALL.html

• To install NLSR: https://docs.named-data.net/NLSR/current/INSTALL.html

• To install ndn-tools: https://github.com/named-data/ndn-tools/blob/master/INSTALL.md

Warning

Please do not try to install NDN software from both the source (GitHub) and PPA (apt). It will not work in most cases! If you used ./install.sh -a in the past but now want to use apt, please run sudo ./waf uninstall in all the NDN projects before proceeding with apt. Similarly, remove from apt if switching to source.

In cases where using NDN security is not important to the results, it is recommended to use the dummy keychain patch for ndn-cxx to disable it for improved scalability. This patch is located at util/patches/ndn-cxx-dummy-keychain.patch.

Note that all three of these can be installed from the Named Data PPA. Instructions for setting it up can be found in the NFD installation instructions. Note that PPA and installs from source cannot be mixed. You must completely remove PPA installs from the system if switching to source and vice-versa.

For PPA installs, if you are using a custom nfd.conf file in an experiment, you should place it in /usr/local/etc/ndn/ rather than /etc/ndn/. This is to avoid a bug from the default configuration file for the PPA, which is incompatible with Mini-NDN.

Infoedit

Infoedit is used to edit configuration files for NFD and NLSR. To install infoedit:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NDN-Routing/infoedit
cd infoedit
make
sudo make install

Verification

You can execute the following example to bring up the Mini-NDN command line with NFD and NLSR running on each node:

sudo python examples/mnndn.py

You can use these steps to run the sample pingall experiment:

1. Issue the command: sudo python examples/nlsr/pingall.py

2. When the mini-ndn> CLI prompt appears, the experiment has finished. On the Mini-NDN CLI, issue the command exit to exit the experiment.

3. Issue the command: grep -c content /tmp/minindn/*/ping-data/*.txt. Each file should report a count of 50.

4. Issue the command: grep -c timeout /tmp/minindn/*/ping-data/*.txt. Each file should report a count of 0.

Release Versions

We provide a set of shortcuts to install major release versions of NDN dependencies from source.

You can install the most recent release using:

./install.sh --source --release=current

You can also select a specified release using:

./install.sh --source --release=[chosen version]

Currently, the compatible versions include:

• 2024-08: ndn-cxx 0.9.0, NFD 24.07, NLSR 24.08, PSync 0.5.0, ndn-tools 24.07, and compatible versions of ndn-traffic-generator and infoedit.