Call for Papers

It is now a common belief that the current Internet will soon reach both its architectural limits and its capacity limits. The 80-20 rule for network traffic depicts a highly asymmetric supply-demand relationship in today’s networks, which renders the current client-server model of interaction inefficient. As a result, significant portions of today’s network traffic are repetitive, and it creates a vast waste of resources and unnecessary traffic jams. It can be argued that the current bottleneck of network capacity is not due to lack of connections or point-to-point link quality. Rather, it is the insufficient utilization of the network capacity with respect to the content being communicated. Recently, the capability to perform computation, storage, and communication in various network devices, including user terminals, access points, routers and gateways, has advanced significantly. It has reached a stage where the majority of standard network devices are expected to have large storage, fast computing, and high-speed communication as default configurations. Such ubiquitous capabilities have augmented the system design dimensions and opened up a new array of exciting opportunities.

Though fifty years have been spent on developing the current Internet, some new Internet systems and architectures are being studied and developed in the present Internet R&D field. The concept of “Future Internet” has been proposed in 2005, since researchers believed that many problems could not be solved under the current Internet structure. Substantial research efforts in Europe, America, and Asia, as well as within the vendors and network operators have resulted in promising proposals to address the limitations of the current Internet architecture. Among future network architectures and systems, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is an attractive model that has received a notable interest from the research community due to its stirring characteristics. Several projects have proposed revolutionary ICN architectures for better management of the Internet usage, which moves from host-centric communication to receiver-driven data retrieval. A significant characteristic of this novel architecture is to evolve the Internet infrastructure to directly support this use by introducing uniquely named data as a core Internet principle. Data becomes independent from location, application, storage, and means of transportation, enabling transparent and pervasive in-network caching and replication.

With the exponential growth in the Internet traffic, the matter of content caching is still a key issue in ICN, and still poses significant challenges. Meanwhile, in order to guide the next stage of R&D, we need to re-examine the existing design principles, ideas, and goals to summarize the success or failure. We then refine key theoretical issues and technical difficulties to provide feasible solutions. In this feature topic, we mainly focus on how to leverage ubiquitous computation, storage, and communication capabilities in ICN through intelligent computing, universal storage, and flexible transmission, to create a novel architecture that can efficiently couple the network and its users, while providing information-centric services. As Internet is a large-scale system and real-time packet processing is required, the proposed new schemes should still retain the features of simplicity and efficiency.

The aim of this Feature Topic (FT) is thus to provide a forum for the discussion of the vital issues relevant to technology challenges and design aspects of leveraging ubiquitous computation, storage, and communication capabilities in ICN. We solicit high-quality papers that explore various aspects of ICN, including but not limited to the following topics:

• Content distribution, cache replacement and corporative caching in ICN
• Naming schemes in ICN, including scalable name resolution for flat names
• Scalable Name-based routing for ICN
• Flexible and reliable transmission control and congestion control issues in ICN
• Joint optimization of interest forwarding, content caching and packet scheduling in ICN
• Security and privacy, including scoping of information objects and access control to them
• Migration mechanisms from today’s networking technologies to ICN
• Intelligent behavioral decision making and network control in ICN

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the Information for Authors section of the Manuscript Submission Guidelines.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Manuscript Central. Select the "February 2019/The Quest for Information Centric Networking" topic from the drop-down menu of Topic/Series titles.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: September 15, 2018
Decision Notification: December 15, 2018
Final Manuscript Due: February 15, 2019
Publication Date: April 2019

Guest Editors

Kaiping Xue
University of Science and Technology of China, China

David S. L. Wei
Dept. of CIS, Fordham University, USA

Roberto Bruschi
S3ITI Federated National Laboratory, Italy

Chih-Lin I
China Mobile Research Institute, China