What is Project CCNx?

Project CCNx™ is an open source project exploring the next step in networking, based on one fundamental architectural change: replacing named hosts with named content as the primary abstraction.  

CCNx was launched with ideas from PARC's Content-Centric Networking (CCN) research program.  The PARC CCN architecture takes content as a primitive and decouples location from identity, security, and access, with no concept of host/machine at the lowest level.  We believe that such a focus on what not where addresses today's communication problems better than the traditional model of packet networking, yet can preserve design decisions that made TCP/IP simple, robust, and scalable.  Project CCNx is a vehicle for sharing these ideas with the research community.

Please note that the CCNx specifications and software are being released at a very early stage of development to foster interaction with other researchers.  What is available now is pure infrastructure, with no applications to demonstrate the potential benefits, and it demands a great deal of technical sophistication and dedication to use.  If you're looking for cool applications that are ready to run, or a solid platform to start building on, you are a little too early.  We intend to keep developing towards those goals, but we are intentionally not there yet.  If you want to start exploring commercial or consumer applications already, see the About Page.

Learn more about the ideas of Content-Centric Networking: Papers and Presentations ...

Watch a Video

PARC Research Fellow Van Jacobson talks about Content-Centric Networking at Google.

Get the Code

The code  is available as a tar file download (numbered releases, somewhat stable) or source release on github (unstable development frontier).  You can quickly pull the code with the following command:
      > git clone git://github.com/ProjectCCNx/ccnx.git

For documentation, check out the Documentation page.

Publications

See our publications and presentations.

Get Involved

Interested in starting your own project based on CCNx software, or care to contribute to the core development of the project?  There are many possibilities for involvement, and the CCNx team would like to foster cross-pollination of ideas to support academic as well as commercial research.

• Help Write Documention
• Submit Bugs
• Submit RFEs
• Create a New Project
• Help Moderate the Forums and Mailing Lists
• Tweet about this project - use the #ccnx hashtag
• Fix a Bug
• Get Involved with the core development