1

Abstract—Named Data Networking (NDN) is a newly proposed In-ternet architecture. NDN retains the Internet’s hourglass architecture but evolves the thin waist. Instead of pushing data to specific loca-tions, NDN retrieves data by name. On one hand, this simple change allows NDN networks to use almost all of the Internet’s well tested engineering properties to solve not only IP’s communication problems but also digital distribution and control problems. On the other hand, a distribution architecture differs in fundamental ways from a point-to-point communication architecture of today’s Internet and raises many new research challenges. Simulation can serve as a flexible tool to examine and evaluate various aspects of this new architecture. To provide the research community at large with a common simulation platform, we have developed an open source NS-3 based simulator, ndnSIM, which faithfully implemented the basic components of a NDN network in a modular way. This paper provides an overview of ndnSIM.