How to use

Overview

There are few distinct atomic tasks a user may want to perform using ndncon:

• Fetch arbitrary media stream from other active user
• Publish own media stream
• Join existing group text chat
• Start new group text chat

One may combine these atomic tasks in order to establish multiple streams fetching/publishing or bi-directional multi-party conference call.

Before diving into more details, please make sure your system satisfies Requirements and you are discoverable on NDN network.

The remainder of this manual will focus on helping to accomplish these atomic tasks:

• How to fetch media stream from active user
• How to publish media stream
• How to join group chat
• How to start new group chat

You may as well be interested in advanced common practices like the following:

• How to organize a multi-party conference
• How to bridge ndncon with existing conferencing tools

Requirements

• MacOS X 10.9 or later;
• NFD or ndnd-tlv forwarder installed and configured properly.

Discovery Setup

Automatic user discovery supported by ndncon helps discover new active users on your NDN network. This is crucial if you'd like to have stream followers (those who will fetch your media streams).

If you want to be discoverable on your NDN network, you have to ensure several things:

• NFD is running on your local machine:

$ nfd-start

• connect to your home hub (NDN hub on the network you've chosen to connect to)

$ nfdc register / udp://<your_home_hub_name_or_ip_address>

• make sure that your home hub has registered two prefixes towards your machine:
  • broadcast prefix (should be /ndn/broadcast)
  • hub's home prefix (for existing NDN testbed, you can find these prefixes here)

NOTE: Existing NDN testbed manages registration of aforementioned prefixes automatically. I.e. once you registered prefix from your machine to an NDN testbed hub, this hub automatically will register broadcast prefix and its' corresponding home prefix towards your machine.

Two-way prefix registration ensures that other users will see your published information as well as you will be able to fetch theirs.