Choosing
The rest of the wiki documents features one at a time. These pages do the opposite: they start from your situation and tell you which feature to reach for — and, just as importantly, what it costs you.
Two rules run through all of them:
- Default to the simplest thing. Plain signed Data over a UDP face with a static route covers more cases than newcomers expect. Add a capability only when a concrete need justifies its cost.
- Every capability has a cost. More confidentiality, more throughput, more autonomy in routing — each buys something and charges something (key distribution, Linux-only code, convergence traffic, compute). The tables below put the charge next to the benefit so you can decide.
Anything marked extension is an ndn-rs addition with no NDN community spec behind it — fine to use, but know that you are leaving the standardised core. See Why NDN is different for that distinction.
The decisions
- Confidentiality — who may read the data (signing already says who wrote it).
- Faces & transports — which bearer a link runs over.
- Routing & discovery — how Interests find producers.
- Reliability & throughput — surviving loss and going faster.
- When to use in-network compute — moving computation to the data. extension