Recent Advances in Information-Centric Networks (ICNs)

The great success of the Internet has been essentially based on the simplicity and versatility of its TCP/IP architecture, which imposes almost no restrictions on either the underlying network technology or on the data being transmitted. In essence, applications built on top of TCP/IP are provided with a point-to-point channel that can be used to transmit arbitrary information. This approach has served quite satisfactorily for many years, but it no longer suits some of the new communication paradigms currently being used on the Internet. Nowadays, most Internet applications are no longer interested in using a point-to-point channel to exchange traffic between two endpoints. In contrast, what they really want is to access information that is available in the other network nodes. Information-centric networks (ICNs) offer a service where users can directly obtain pieces of information, regardless of their location. This service is more suited to current network uses and to support the highly dynamic nature of mobile networks. Additionally, the legacy point-to-point communication model can be provided on top of it, if so desired. Named data networking (NDN) is an implementation of ICN that has emerged as a promising candidate for future Internet architecture. In contrast to traditional networking protocols, NDN focuses on the content itself, rather than on its location. NDN enables name-based routing and location-independent data retrieval. This Special Issue, titled “Recent Advances in Information-Centric Networks (ICNs)”, aims to highlight and to present recent advances about different problems related to using information-centric network architecture. It contains nine high-quality research papers and one review paper. As usual, the Future Internet journal standards required that all the submitted manuscripts went through a rigorous peer-review process. In the following, we will use the authors’ own words to avoid misinterpretation and to provide a more accurate presentation of the contributions of each paper.

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