The idea of NFN attained first public exposure at the CCNxCon 2012 meeting. A year later the project has started getting flesh and bones, with a couple of first workshop papers, and a progress report presented and demoed at CCNxCon 2013. In summer 2014, a first working implementation based on CCN-lite runs NFN-over-CCNx and NFN-over-NDN, with Scala hosting the nameable functions.

Named Function Networking (NFN) is a companion project to Named Data Networking. Likewise, we embrace the "Content Centric Networking" approach, as it is generically called, and would like to see it thrive ... and add to it a new twist!

Named Function Networking is: an ICN style where the request carries at least two names in order to be satisfied

Our stance is that CCN can benefit from a functional perspective: Instead of organizing access to data, names serve to access and invoke functions, which incidentally can produce passive content once it is needed. New questions arise from this point of view, namely how the network organizes the flow of functions, which brings us squarely into active networking turf.

In Named-Function Networking

• - users can name the functions, and the network can delivers the results
• - lambda expressions are used to resolve names to computations
• - two interfaces are available: SCALA & Python
• - many use cases are treated: namespace and packet format translation, MapReduce, IoT gateways, service chaining
• - and it is interoperable with CCN-Lite project

Named-Function Networking (NFN) is being developed by the Computer Networks group at the Mathematics and Computer Science Dept of the University of Basel. This work is completely free (it is not GNU, it is Berkeley style licence)