NDN project to attend Google Summer of Code 2020

Google Summer of Code is a major event in the IT world for a vast majority of students and organizations worldwide. With a timeline of 15 years (since 2005) the event has provided an opportunity for student-coders of all backgrounds to participate in the program while working with renowned open-source organizations worldwide. It is an awesome possibility to kickstart your career as a coder, interact with other developers, learn from industry leaders, and gain valuable experience.

The program started on June 1-st, 2020 and will finish on August 24, 2020; the results will be announced on September 8-th, 2020. Having so many bright minds gathered for the event to collaborate with one another, the NDN team just couldn’t resist being a part of the event as an open-source organization.

As a project NDN aims to build a new generation of the Internet that is based on distributed network communication protocols. An open-source code on Github and a testbed is a good place to start for anyone who’s interested in getting acquainted with the project from a technical standpoint. Being a new distributed network communication transmission protocol with rich ecological applications, NDN has been successfully applied in various fields such as data transmission, file forwarding, live-streaming, social media, decentralized transactions, etc.

Overall there are 5 project ideas presented by the original NDN team.

• GitSync

This project supports running Git over a Named Data Network (NDN), replacing a centralized server with distributed GitSync instances. The project’s goal is to develop a git peer application that runs over NDN.

• npChat

npChat is a photo and file sharing application built on Android and is inspired by Snapchat. Through this application the team wants to demonstrate the benefits of NDN and provide an open source, distributed alternative to Snapchat. The primary goal for GSoC 2020 is to add text messaging as a feature and to update the UI to include visual indicators of received messages, photos, and friend requests.

• DLedger

Dledger’s  project’s goal is to adapt the idea of Graph-based Distributed Ledger (DLedger) to the certificate management on NDN testbed and evaluate its scalability, usability, and effectiveness.

• iViSA

iViSA is an adaptive video streaming service that allows Internet users to enjoy watching videos over NDN. This is the first public NDN-based service/application that allows daily Internet users to use the NDN technology without installing any software/plugin or manual configuration. This GSoC project aims to improve iViSA service by adding new features to it like browser caching and validating the current implementation by developing different unit-tests.

named-data.net videos are running with the help of the iVISA service.

• Disk Repository Over NDN

This project will attempt to create a high-performance, NDN-based interface to existing disk-based storage utilized by the science communities.

In order to expand the NDN ecosystem and have a better outreach within developer communities, NDN will continue to participate in Google Summer of code (Gsoc) 2020, which is officially supported by Google and is one of the most well-known and popular events for encouraging new contributors with open source development.

We believe that because of NDN’s participation in Gsoc 2020, the ecological applications based on the NDN distributed network will become more abundant, and there will be more developers in the NDN network.