Blockchain technology in Named Data Networks: A detailed survey

With massive new applications and online services, the future design of the Internet will have new requirements and implications, such as compatible mobility, scalability, reliability and security. The Named Data Networking (NDN) is the most promising future internet architecture paradigm which focuses on content driven communication. Unlike traditional IP networks, named content-based data networks (NDNs) can quickly retrieve and deliver content. Blockchain technology has been widely used for decentralized payments, asset management, healthcare and cloud computing etc. Blockchain provides a decentralized and distributed solution to maintain consistent and reliable records in unreliable networks without the need of a centralized authority. However, blockchain technology over IP has still some serious problems such as lack of efficiency for hierarchical access. The use of blockchain technology over NDN has solved these problems providing a decentralized system and simplifying the architecture. In this paper, we present a detailed and comprehensive survey on the use of blockchain technology in NDN for the very first time. Finally, some research challenges and key issues have been discussed.