ICST Transactions on Information-Centric Networking (ISSN: 2032-9482)

Description

Content creation today is easy, cheap, and ubiquitous. From digital cameras embedded in mobile phones to environmental sensors to Web 2.0, users are generating and interconnecting unprecedented amounts of information and this trend is expected to continue unabated. Professional, expedited, and reliable content distribution, on the other hand, is not cheap and requires heavy and increasing investments in infrastructure build out and maintenance. Content Distribution Network technology and peer-to-peer networks alleviate the problem by pushing content to the network edges but they have to depend on the fundamentals of the current host-centric paradigm, which is not well suited for disseminating information. A key challenge is how do we move beyond merely transporting data and how do we effectively protect information.
Early signs of the rift between what is being carried and how it gets delivered were seen with the introduction of the WWW, the de facto global dissemination network. Web, peer-to-peer, and web-based video-on-demand services are currently dominating Internet traffic and, taken together, have consistently comprised 85% or more of the Internet traffic mix for years. In practice, we are operating dissemination networks using methods from a remote-access paradigm, replicating functionality at several parts of the protocol stack, and failing to benefit from recent advances in wired and wireless communications, storage technologies, and Moore’s Law. The prevailing point-to-point paradigm in today’s networking architecture prevents us from using multicast and broadcast technologies in an efficient way. In wireless networks, which are based on an inherently broadcast medium, we first emulate point-to-point links before we run broadcast or multicast protocols over those links. Further, the integration of pure broadcast networks, like radio and TV distribution networks, into content distribution networks is not well explored.
Mobile devices will be the main means of accessing the Future Internet, not only in developed countries but especially in the developing world. Multi-access mobile devices and the very nature of wireless media have the potential to spur new architectures focusing on information dissemination, far more suitable than the deployed Internet. Starting from a clean slate will allow us to protect information effectively in the scope of information-centric networking. Thus, new ideas and solutions that revisit fundamental principles in network stack design and target information dissemination, instead of simply remote access to information, will be the heart of the next era in networking. We are after new solutions for content creation and distribution for the emerging multi-access mobile broadband network environment and anticipate that this step-change in networking will require extensive cross-discipline cooperation and rethinking the communication/storage/computation trade-off we take now for granted. In particular, methods and techniques from CDNs, P2P, cooperative networking, multi-access management, energy-efficient design, as well as physical-layer awareness will have to be capitalized upon. A key challenge is the development of information-centric secure networking and effective protection of the network against misuse.
ICST Transactions on Information-Centric Networking is the first peer-reviewed journal specializing on this nascent area of research. The journal aims at becoming the main global forum for high quality and unpublished contributions addressing all aspects of information-centric networks, including both evolutionary and revolutionary approaches. The journal in particular invites provocative, but well-documented, articles that challenge the way we design, implement, deploy, and operate networks.
Specific areas of interest:
Information-centric network architectures
Information models for the future Internet
Multi-access and dissemination networks
Naming and name resolution
Evolved peer-to-peer networks
Cooperative networking and distributed systems
Information/service discovery
Design, implementation, and evaluation, including testbed/experimental results
Energy-efficient content distribution
Attack models and risk management allowing to reason and handle threats
Methods and technologies protecting information-centric networks and avoiding misuse
Security, self-certification, privacy and trust in information-centric networks
Keywords

information-centric networking, content-centric networking, Future Internet, computer networks, inter-networking, mobile multi-access networks, CDN, P2P, naming, cooperative networking, security.
Editor-in-Chief
Dr. Kostas Pentikousis is a Senior Research Scientist at VTT, in Oulu, Finland. He studied Computer Science in Greece (B.Sc. 1996 Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) and the USA (M.Sc. 2000, Ph.D. 2004 State University of New York at Stony Brook). He has been working in R and D positions since 1996 in both industry and academia, and has been involved in seven multi-partner research projects, including Ambient Networks Phase 2, where he served as a Task Leader, WEIRD and 4WARD. With his colleagues in 4WARD and the Finnish Strategic Centres for Science, Technology and Innovation (ICT SHOK) “Future Internet” Programme, he is currently investigating future Internet architectures, in particular information-centric networking. Dr. Pentikousis has (co)authored more than 70 technical publications, presented tutorials at APNOMS 2005, ISCC 2006, MUM 2008, and ICN 2009. He has been serving as a Technical Program Committee member and reviewer in several conferences and journals, and most recently serves as the General Chair of MediaWiN 2009 and MONAMI 2009.
Editorial Board
Rui Aguiar
University of Aveiro, Portugal
Prosper Chemouil
Orange Labs, France Télécom, France
Frank H.P. Fitzek
University of Aalborg, Denmark
Djamal Zeghlache
TELECOM SudParis, France
Roch Glitho
Concordia University, Canada
Marcos Katz
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Finland
Pekka Nikander
Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Finland
Börje Ohlman
Ericsson Research, Sweden
Anand R. Prasad
NEC Corporation, Japan
Peter Schoo
Fraunhofer SIT München, Germany
Theodore Zahariadis
TEI of Chalkida, Greece