## 3 Information-Centric Networking
### Why ICN for INC
If the original service producer becomes unavailable, cached results can still fulfill requests, ensuring continuous service availability. This capability is especially valuable in dynamic environments such as edge networks and IoT systems, where network disruptions or node failures can occur frequently. **Stateful Forwarding. ** ICN routers maintain state information about active requests: when a request for content or service is received, the router tracks it in its memory, which allows the network to intelligently forward responses and adapt to changes [14]. In particular, stateful forwarding naturally enables multicast communication: when multiple consumers request the same content or service, the router can aggregate these requests and forwards only one copy of the message upstream. The resulting content or service output is then distributed to all consumers without requiring redundant transmissions. In the context of INC, this reduces the computational overhead at upstream nodes, by ensuring that tasks such as data processing, analytics, or transformations are performed only once for multiple consumers. Further benefits include reduced bandwidth consumption and enhanced scalability for popular or frequently accessed resources. Stateful forwarding also allows routers to dynamically adjust packet transmissions based on real-time network conditions, thus minimizing delays and ensuring higher reliability and load balancing. For example, routers can select alternative paths to bypass congestion or recover from link failures, without requiring end-to-end reconfiguration, or they can distribute requests across multiple paths, optimizing resource utilization across the network. Tracking active requests also allows us to implement in-network congestion control mechanisms [11]. If a router detects excessive demand for certain content or congestion on specific links, it can limit the forwarding of new requests or reroute them to less congested paths. For INC, such mechanisms help manage workloads at computational nodes by preventing bottlenecks and ensuring fair distribution of processing tasks, ultimately improving the responsiveness and reliability of the overall system. **Security by Design. ** Unlike traditional IP-based networking, which primarily cures the communication channel, e.g., using protocols like TLS/SSL, ICN introduces a fundamentally different security paradigm by focusing on the data itself. In ICN, every piece of data is cryptographically signed at its source. Thus, any recipient is able to verify the authenticity and integrity of the content, independent of the communication path it traversed. As a result, the need for a direct, trusted connection between the sender and receiver is eliminated [13]. Data-centric security protects against content tampering and forgery, as any alteration to the data will render the signature invalid, and it mitigatesman-in-the-middle and replay attacks, as the focus shifts away from securing the channel to securing the data payload itself [51]. These features are particularly beneficial for INC, as they ensure that computations executed on-the-fly at intermediate, not a priori known, nodes are always verifiable. Integrity and authenticity of both the input data and the computational outputs are guaranteed, building trust in the distributed processing environment and ensuring secure interactions between clients and in-network services. Last but not least, data-centric security facilitates caching at intermediate nodes, since cached data retains its security properties and can be verified by subsequent consumers without requiring a new connection to the original source. **Mobility Support. ** By decoupling data from their original location, ICN inherently addresses the challenges of client mobility. In traditional IP-based networks, mobility requires maintaining a stable connection to a fixed endpoint, often relying on complex mechanisms such as Mobile IP or tunneling to manage changes in user location.