The Quest for Information-Centric Networking

The articles in this special section focus on the topic of information centric networking (ICN), an approach that shifts the Internet infrastructure from a host-centric paradigm, based on perpetual connectivity and the end-to-end principle, to a new paradigm where named data becomes independent from location, application, storage, and means of transportation, enabling in-network storage and replication. The expected benefits include improved effi ciency, better scalability with respect to information/bandwidth demand, and better robustness in challenging communication scenarios. As the most promising clean-slate approach for future Internet, ICN has attracted much attention in the past few years, and created a trajectory that is to replace the current IP-based Internet. There have been many prototypes of ICN, but more research is still ongoing, which includes naming, forwarding/routing, and caching policy, deployment strategy, security policy, and so on.