NDNBrowser: An extended web browser for named data networking

Web applications have become one of the fundamental Internet services. How to effectively support the popular browser-based web applications is a key to success for Named Data Networking (NDN). However, since NDN has a totally different running mechanism from the traditional IP network, the existing web browsers mainly designed for the HTTP protocol and the TCP/IP-based Internet rather than named data networking, cannot communicate with NDN routers directly and do not inherently support the NDN-based web applications. Instead of providing a browser add-on or HTTP–NDN proxy/gateway, we designed and developed a complete NDNBrowser based on open source WebKit to natively support NDN-based web applications in the web browser kernel. Some inherent NDN features are seamlessly integrated into the browser to support the direct interactions between web browser and NDN network. Considering backwards compatibility and smooth network evolution, the NDNBrowser enables content fetching and rendering by both ‘ccnx:/’ and ‘http:/’ schemes URI in HTML, CSS and JavaScript simultaneously. Experimental results show that the NDNBrowser outperforms existing NDN.JS and HTTP–NDN proxy/gateway implementations by 19× and 5× respectively in terms of throughput. Finally, a real NDN-based web application is deployed on a NDN experimental network in our campus environment for network innovations to verify the practicability of NDNBrowser.