NDN Forwarder Comparison

A feature comparison of major open-source NDN forwarder implementations, ordered from features common to all to features found in only one. This page is reference, not advocacy: cells for other projects reflect what their upstream documentation states at the time of writing.

Legend

Marker	Meaning
✅	Supported
➖	Partial, external project, or library-only
❌	Not supported

For the ndn-fwd column, supported features are further annotated with release status:

Marker	Meaning
✅	Ready for v0.1.0 — implemented, tested, and in the default build
◐	Partial — feature-gated, incomplete, not integration-tested, or not in default members
○	Future — stub, experimental, or explicitly planned for a later release

Table

Feature	NFD (C++)	NDNd (Go)	NDN-DPDK (C)	ndn-fwd (Rust)
── Core NDN protocol ──
TLV Interest / Data (v0.3)	✅	✅	✅	✅
PIT · CS · FIB	✅	✅	✅	✅
Nack / NDNLPv2	✅	✅	✅	✅
Best-route strategy	✅	✅	✅	✅
Multicast strategy	✅	✅	✅	✅
NFD management TLV protocol	✅	✅	➖ GraphQL	✅
── Common transports ──
UDP · TCP · Unix	✅	✅	✅	✅
Ethernet (AF_PACKET / L2)	✅	✅	✅	◐
WebSocket	✅	✅	❌	✅
WebSocket + TLS listener	✅	✅	❌	◐
HTTP/3 WebTransport	❌	✅	❌	❌
── Strategies ──
ASF (adaptive SRTT)	✅	✅	➖	✅
Pluggable strategy extension point	➖ compile-in	➖ compile-in	➖ eBPF	✅ trait
Hot-loadable WASM strategies	❌	❌	❌	◐
── Content store backends ──
In-memory LRU	✅	✅	✅ mempool	✅
Sharded / parallel CS	❌	❌	✅	✅
Disk-backed CS	❌	❌	❌	✅ Fjall
── Routing / sync ──
Static routes	✅	✅	✅	✅
NLSR (link-state)	➖ external	❌	➖ external	➖ external
Distance-vector routing	❌	✅ `ndn-dv`	❌	✅ built-in
SVS / PSync	➖ library	➖ `ndnd/std`	❌	✅ library
SWIM neighbour discovery	❌	❌	❌	✅
── Performance / hardware ──
Zero-copy packet path	➖	➖	✅ DPDK	✅ `Bytes`
Kernel-bypass I/O (DPDK / XDP)	❌	❌	✅	❌
100 Gb/s-class throughput	❌	❌	✅	❌
── Less common transports ──
Shared-memory SPSC face	❌	❌	✅ memif	✅ `ShmFace` (Unix)
Serial / COBS (embedded)	❌	❌	❌	◐
BLE GATT face	❌	❌	❌	◐
Wifibroadcast (WFB) face	❌	❌	❌	○
In-process face	❌	❌	❌	✅
── Security ──
ECDSA / RSA / Ed25519 / HMAC	✅	✅	➖	✅
SHA-256 digest signatures	✅	✅	✅	✅
BLAKE3 plain + keyed (sig-types 6/7)	❌	❌	❌	✅
LightVerSec binary trust schema	➖ library	✅ `ndnd/std`	❌	✅
NDNCERT 0.3 client	➖ ndncert	✅ `certcli`	❌	✅
Compile-time verified-vs-unverified Data type split	❌	❌	❌	✅ `SafeData`
── Deployment model ──
Standalone daemon	✅	✅	✅	✅
Forwarder embeddable as library	❌	❌	❌	✅
Bare-metal `no_std` build	❌	❌	❌	○ `ndn-embedded`
Mobile (Android / iOS)	➖ NDN-Lite	❌	❌	○ `ndn-mobile`
WebAssembly / in-browser simulation	❌	❌	❌	◐ `ndn-wasm`
Built-in network simulator	➖ ndnSIM	❌	❌	✅ `ndn-sim`
── Ecosystem / tooling ──
CLI tools (peek/put/ping/etc.)	✅ ndn-tools	✅	➖	✅
Throughput / latency bench suite	➖ external	➖ internal	✅	✅
Multi-forwarder compliance testbed	❌	❌	❌	✅ Docker Compose
Desktop GUI management	❌	❌	❌	◐ Dioxus
Python bindings	➖ separate	❌	❌	◐ PyO3
JVM / Swift bindings	❌	❌	❌	◐ BoltFFI
In-network named-function compute	❌	❌	❌	◐ `ndn-compute`

ndn-fwd v0.1.0 status notes

The markers above reflect the state of the main branch as the v0.1.0 release is prepared.

Partial (◐) in v0.1.0:

Ethernet L2, WebSocket TLS, Serial COBS — functional but behind non-default Cargo features; not exercised by the default CI matrix.
BLE GATT face — implementation present under the bluetooth feature with a known TODO around macOS TX drain; not yet interop-tested.
Hot-loadable WASM strategies — ndn-strategy-wasm exists as a proof of concept but is not yet wired into ndn-engine as a runtime loader.
WebAssembly browser sim (ndn-wasm) — builds for wasm32-unknown-unknown but not in default workspace members.
Dioxus desktop dashboard — compiles and runs against a live forwarder but is not formally release-tested.
Python (PyO3) and JVM/Swift (BoltFFI) bindings — build on a developer machine with platform toolchains installed but are not part of default members or CI artefacts.
ndn-compute — experimental named-function compute runtime; API surface is not frozen for v0.1.0.

Future (○) — post-v0.1.0:

Wifibroadcast (WFB) face — placeholder crate; recv / send currently return FaceError::Closed.
ndn-embedded bare-metal no_std forwarder — skeleton exists; MCU targets and allocators not yet wired up.
ndn-mobile Android / iOS forwarder — requires platform toolchains (NDK, Xcode) and is not yet part of any release build.

Notes on other forwarders

NDN-DPDK is a specialised high-throughput forwarder targeting DPDK-capable NICs; absence of WebSocket or a standard-library-style app API reflects that focus, not a gap. Strategies are implemented as eBPF programs loaded via the DPDK BPF library and executed on the uBPF virtual machine (see container/strategycode/README.md upstream).
NDNd subsumes the earlier YaNFD project: ndnd/fw is the continuation of YaNFD, shipped alongside ndnd/dv (distance-vector routing), ndnd/std (Go application library with Light VerSec binary schema support), and security tooling (sec, certcli). Its sample yanfd.config.yml also exposes an HTTP/3 WebTransport listener.
NFD is the reference implementation; many features listed as “➖ external” (NLSR, ndncert, ndn-tools) are maintained as separate projects under the named-data organisation and are the canonical implementations of those features.
ndn-fwd uses the Face, Strategy, ContentStore, RoutingProtocol, and DiscoveryProtocol traits as extension points. The engine itself is a library crate (ndn-engine); the ndn-fwd binary is a thin wrapper around it, which enables the embeddable / no_std / mobile / WebAssembly build targets.
Rows marked “library” mean the feature exists as an application-level library in that project’s ecosystem but is not a built-in forwarder capability.

Sources

NFD: named-data/NFD
NDNd (incl. former YaNFD): named-data/ndnd
NDN-DPDK: usnistgov/ndn-dpdk
ndn-fwd: this repository — see ARCHITECTURE.md