Information-centric networking for multimedia, social and peer-to-peer communications

Information-centric networking (ICN) is an emerging networking paradigm, which is considered as a possible solution for the next generation Internet. Several research projects have been funded by the state and the industry towards the specification and implementation of ICN solutions, whereas Internet Research Task Force has established a research group for this reason, the Information-Centric Networking Research Group. However, the use of ICN in action will be decided on the basis of its performance in several disciplines that, eventually, concern the users expectations from their applications over the future Internet. Currently, statistics suggest that, in the near future, the Internet bandwidth will be mainly consumed by multimedia and peer-to-peer applications. Furthermore, social networking applications become more and more popular both to end-users and businesses. This special issue includes papers illustrating how information-centric networks can effectively address practical issues rising in ICN deployments considering multimedia applications and social networking technologies. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.