[Nfd-dev] Autoconfig for local WiFi network

[Junxiao Shi]

Hi Jeff

Generally, it's impossible to support every AP configuration. The AP in my
apartment is configured to disallow any communication between wireless
stations (unicast or multicast). In other words, a wireless station can
only connect to the Internet.

Many commercial APs are configured to disallow multicast from wireless
stations, but allow unicast between wireless stations.
In this case, it's theoretically possible to enumerate the unicast address
space (assuming it's not too large) to find if there's another NDN-enabled
system, but this not only cannot scale, but also look like port scanning
and get blocked.

A much better situation is an AP that allows certain multicast protocols
between wireless stations, such as Apple Bonjour which is used by iMacs to
discover each other.
It's theoretically possible to implement a multicast transport using one of
the allowed protocols (transmit NDN packets over Apple Bonjour), but that
would increase the overhead of non-NDN systems in the network.
NFD Feature 3465 <http://redmine.named-data.net/issues/3465> explores
running autoconfig over an allowed multicast protocol. The expected outcome
of this feature is that one laptop can be designated as the router by
running `ndn-autoconfig-server`, and other laptops can run `ndn-autoconfig`
to find the router.
Ideally, it's possible to discover the unicast addresses of all NDN-enabled
systems over an allowed multicast protocol, to eliminate the need of
designating a router. But we are not there yet.

Yours, Junxiao

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 9:19 AM, Burke, Jeff <jburke at remap.ucla.edu> wrote:

>
> *"You’ll need to configure your access point to permit multicast traffic
> among wireless stations."*
>
> I mentioned to Peter that I thought this was the case.  I think the
> concern here is that in "real life", where Peter is hoping to experiment
> with NDN-RTC more and more, we can't always control infrastructure in this
> way.
>
> So what Peter is asking is whether there is (or could be) a way to
> automatically bootstrap local communication between NFDs on different
> devices connected to the same not-necessarily-internet-connected access
> point without requiring any configuration on the AP.
> (Peter please correct me if I'm wrong)
>
> Jeff
>
>
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