MDPI Future Internet Special Issue 2019 : Special Issue on Content Centric Future Internet Architectures

Dear Colleagues,

The legacy IP-based Internet architecture has been used to communicate contents over the globe. The main objective of the IP-based communication architecture is to identify each node in the network. This node ID is used to establish a communication channel between the source and destination node(s) that could be one or multiple hops apart. In order to achieve secure communication, efforts are focused on protecting the channel instead of securing the content itself. Further, the establishment of a secure channel in the network with intermittent connectivity due to node mobility is always a challenging task. In this regard, several standards have been proposed and researchers from academia and industry are continuously proposing different solutions. However, all research efforts fail to achieve secure and mobility-resilient communication in these networks.

Recently, new future Internet architectures have been proposed that consider content to be the first-class citizen and put it at the center of communication. The most widely researched future Internet architecture is named data networking (NDN), a detailed implementation of its predecessor, called content-centric networking (CCN). NDN inherently secures the content by communicating the security credentials of the content along with it. Each content in NDN is identified and communicated using the URI-like name. Any node that has the matching content simply replies with the content, which doesn’t require the original content producer to reply to the content. This is achieved only by adopting the caching feature, which helps to efficiently distribute the content within the network.

This Special Issue invites original, novel, and high quality solutions for NDN and future Internet architectures. The Special Issue focuses on topics that include, but are not limited to:

Efficient caching schemes
Interest-data forwarding in NDN
Interest-data broadcast control
Impact of interest-data broadcast on battery-operated devices
Mobility support
NDN-based applications
Security issues in NDN

Prof. Safdar H. Bouk
Guest Editor