Abstract Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of the promising future internet architectures, which focuses on the data rather than its location (IP/host-based system). NDN has several characteristics which facilitate addressing and routing the data: fail-over, in-network caching and load balancing. This makes it useful in areas such as managing scientific data across a distributed infrastructure. The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) runs such an infrastructure and has a data access pattern amenable to Information-Centric Networking (ICN). In this paper, we propose SDTMA-NDN (Scientific Data Transfer Management Architecture using NDN) to distribute CMS’s software to worker-nodes and end-users. We provide several strategies to enhance the performance of NDN in transferring the scientific data. We build this on top of CERN Virtual Machine File System (CVMFS), a global, distributed filesystem designed to be used with cache-friendly workloads. CVMFS maintains its data by using content-addressable storage, which makes it suitable for NDN and a reasonable starting point for CMS. We examine the effect of in-network caching of NDN on the latency, how NDN provides transparent path selection to avoid high latency in the path, and how it balances several paths for retrieving the data. We compare SDTMA-NDN to the HTTP proxies used in the existing CVMFS-Content Distribution Network (CDN). Also, we propose two NDN forwarding strategies for retrieving the data; NDN Best-Path strategy (NDN-BP) and NDN Multi-path strategy (NDN-MP). SDTMA-NDN shows a better performance than the existing HTTP protocol in transferring the data. Further, it shows more resiliency and outperforms CVMFS-CDN under different network conditions.