Information-centric networking [Guest editorial]

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a relatively new research area that is motivated by significant changes witnessed in the industry regarding applications and services, as well as customer practice and expectations. Indeed, the vast majority of network traffic today (both Internet and intranet) consists of content dissemination, information that is addressed to more than one recipient. This includes not only content created explicitly for public dissemination (e.g., by large organizations such as news agencies, movie studios, and meteorological offices), but also content dissemination between restricted groups of recipients and, increasingly, content generated by end users.