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GUEST EDITORIAL
Information-Centric Networking beyond Baseline Scenarios: Research Advances and Implementation
Xiaohua Jia
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Kostas Pentikousis
Jianping Wang
nformation-centric networking (ICN) has received significant attention in recent years, mainly driven by the fact that distributing and manipulating information has become the major function of the Internet today. Unlike the traditional host-centric networking paradigm where information is obtained by contacting specified named hosts, ICN is aimed at providing native network primitives for efficient information retrieval by directly naming and operating on information objects. Foreseeing the need and benefits of developing the future Internet with ICN concepts as a key ingredient, many leading research groups, both industrial and academic, have created a sizable community devoting their efforts to information-centric future Internet designs and prototype implementations. To date, the work in this area has centered on ICN for (largely static) content storage. Within the wider network research area, there are those who believe ICN cannot work for real-time communications, dynamic content, and other network scenarios. Strong supporters, on the contrary, believe that ICN can be what comes after the current Internet. As the current Internet architecture is deeply entrenched and has proven itself resilient to changes in usage over the decades, a viable candidate for the future Internet needs to do everything the current Internet does and more. Furthermore, it must do it better. This means that researchers must move beyond architectural proposals and apply ICN to both the common communications applications of the Internet and other problems, particularly those more difficult to address with today’s Internet protocols and architecture. So far, architectural work in the ICN literature outweighs implementation- and application-oriented papers. The goal of this Special Issue is to help the community address this imbalance and truly explore the capabilities of the ICN approach. More specifically, this Special Issue comprises eight articles covering architecture design, incentive design, and interoperability of ICNs from the perspec-
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Prosper Chemouil
Kathleen Nichols
tives of the network service provider, information resilience, and applications. This special issue opens with an article by Luo et al. that introduces an information-centric Internet architecture named CoLoR. CoLoR couples service location with interdomain routing while decoupling them from forwarding, and allows every domain to optimize its intradomain routing independently. In the second article, Wu et al. propose a service-oriented ICN architecture called SOFIA. SOFIA decouples service processing and data transmission into a service layer and a network layer. The architecture has the potential to position the service layer above the network layer as the new narrow waist. In the next article, Saucez et al. take a game theoretic approach to address the issues of pricing and incentive designs in providing so-called over-the-top (OTT) services using ICN techniques. A key question here is how ICN can be widely adopted based on sound business models. The analysis in this article shows that the price structure must be carefully planned in order to draw users to the ICN model. In the fourth article, Ren et al. abstract the common functionalities of various ICN architectures and propose a versatile ICN (VICN), which can enable different ICN architectures and can facilitate interoperation between ICN instances. In the evolution of ICN, VICN would allow network service providers to deploy and upgrade ICN instances more smoothly. The fifth article of this Special Issue, by Al-Naday et al., proposes source recovery for ICN-based on enhancements deployed over the PURSUIT architecture. This article provides a good trial for information resilience in ICN. The sixth article by Tyson et al. discusses how to apply ICN in situations where disaster has struck (e.g., after a natural catastrophe). The aspects worth consideration in this case include information resilience, connectivity resilience, resilience collaboration, and superior disruption tolerance. The authors analyze the main challenges in
IEEE Network • May/June 2014
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GUEST EDITORIAL applying ICN in emergency scenarios such as information and sources discovery, convergence of routing/resolution, and push-based dissemination. In the seventh article, Shang et al. design and build a building automation system (BAS) over named data networking (NDN). The proposed system has been implemented in a real environment at the University of California, Los Angeles. This ICN application provides some insights on building general-purpose secure NDN applications. Finally, the eighth article discusses how to apply the concept of ICN for machine-to-machine communications. In particular, they chose smart grid as a case study, in which applications are delay-sensitive, while network components are heterogeneous. In summary, this Special Issue presents the latest developments regarding ICN, indicating its value in a wide range of applications. We sincerely thank all authors and reviewers, who allowed us to present a wide range of the latest research in this field. We believe that the findings in such articles will stimulate the further development of ICN.
Biographies X IAOHUA J IA [F] (
[email protected]) received his B.Sc. (1984) and M.Eng. (1987) from the University of Science and Technology of China, and his D.Sc. (1991) in information science from University of Tokyo. He is currently Chair Professor with the Department of Computer Science at the City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include cloud computing and distributed systems, computer networks, wireless sensor networks, and mobile wireless networks. He is or has been an Editor of IEEE Internet of Things, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (2006–2009), Wireless Networks, Journal of World Wide Web , Journal of Combinatorial Optimization , and others. He has been the General Chair of ACM MobiHoc 2008, TPC Co-Chair of IEEE MASS 2009, Area-Chair of IEEE INFOCOM 2010, TPC Co-Chair of IEEE GLOBECOM 2010 — Ad Hoc and Sensor Networking Symposium, Panel Co-Chair of IEEE INFO-
IEEE Network • May/June 2014
COM 2011, and Local Co-Chair of ACM SIGCOMM. KOSTAS PENTIKOUSIS (
[email protected]) is the head of IT infrastructure at the European Center for Information and Communication Technologies (EICT GmbH), Berlin, Germany. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in informatics (1996) from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and his Master’s (2000) and doctoral degrees (2004) in computer science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His research interests include network architecture, protocol design and information-centric networking. Visit http://linkedin.com/in/kostas for more details. JIANPING WANG (
[email protected]) is currently an associate professor at the City University of Hong Kong. She has been actively conducting research in a broad range of areas in networking, including dependable networking, wireless networking, cloud computing, optical networking, service-oriented networking, integration of optical and wireless networks, and secure network coding. She is currently an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and Wiley’s Security and Communication Networks Journal . She served as Security Symposium Co-Chair for IEEE Wireless and Optical Communication Conference 2013. She is the IEEE GLOBECOM 2014 Symposium Chair for Optical Networks and Systems. PROSPER CHEMOUIL [F] (
[email protected]) is a research director in the area of future networks at Orange Labs Networks, the corporate unit of Orange encompassing R&D. He graduated from École Centrale de Nantes in 1975 and obtained a Ph.D. in control theory in 1978. His interests are in the design and management of future networks and technologies and their impact on network architecture, traffic engineering and control, and performance and quality of service. He is specifically involved in new networking paradigms like information-centric, programmable, and autonomic networking, and is currently involved in the newly-created IEEE SDN initiative. He has been a Guest Editor of two Feature Topics of IEEE Communications Magazine on Information-Centric Networking. For more information, see http://perso.rd.francetelecom.fr/chemouil/. KATHLEEN NICHOLS (
[email protected]) is founder and CTO of Pollere, Inc. and previously held advanced architecture, research, and management positions in a number of companies. Her current interests include techniques to measure and solve “bufferbloat” in the current Internet and the application of ICN to specialized networks of intermittently connected devices such as home appliances and first responders. She is the Principal Investigator on Pollere’s current U.S. Department of Energy SBIR grant developing a passive measurement technique for network delay. She holds a Ph.D. in electrical and electronics computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.
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