Exploring the Design of Collaborative Applications via the Lens of NDN Workspace

TL;DR

The paper tackles the challenge of enabling timely, secure, direct data exchange for metaverse applications without relying on cloud servers. It proposes NDN Workspace, a data-centric, semantically named web application that uses signed, encrypted Data packets and in-network storage to support direct multi-user collaboration, offline operation, and asynchronous updates. The work contributes a concrete architecture, semantic naming schemes, trust policies, two membership models, CRDT-based conflict resolution, and an in-network Repo for persistence, along with a TypeScript implementation and initial evaluations. This approach demonstrates a practical path toward decentralized, low-latency metaverse apps and provides libraries to help others build similar applications, potentially reducing reliance on centralized cloud services.

Abstract

Metaverse applications desire to communicate with semantically identified objects among a diverse set of cyberspace entities, such as cameras for collecting images from, sensors for sensing environment, and users collaborating with each other, all could be nearby or far away, in a timely and secure way. However, supporting the above function faces networking challenges. Today's metaverse implementations are, by and large, use secure transport connections to communicate with cloud servers instead of letting participating entities communicate directly. In this paper, we use the design and implementation of NDN Workspace, a web-based, multi-user collaborative app to showcase a new way to networking that supports many-to-many secure data exchanges among communicating entities directly. NDN Workspace users establish trust relations among each other, exchange URI-identified objects directly, and can collaborate through intermittent connectivity, all in the absence of cloud servers. Its data-centric design offers an exciting new approach to metaverse app development.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: This figure shows the NDN Workspace application architecture. Users access the application through a browser. The browser takes a user's identifier and goes through security process to obtain the user's certificate and trust policies. After the bootstrapping step, the browser can name and secure all text edits the user makes, disseminates the data to other participants, as well as verify all the received data produced by others, and stores data into local disk.
• Figure 2: Alice's Data packet includes its packet name, content, and signature. The signature field includes a key locator, which refers another Data packet from Alice that contains her key.
• Figure 3: The Data namespace tree of "MeetRoom" workspace. Each node represents a name component.
• Figure 4: "MeetRoom" workspace in two membership models.
• Figure 5: NDN Workspace represents file structure as a document, which is a collection of shared data structures.