# Recent Advances in Information-Centric Networks (ICNs)
###### Abstract  
The great success of the Internet has been essentially based on the simplicity and versatility of its TCP/IP architecture, which imposes almost no restrictions on either the underlying network technology or on the data being transmitted. In essence, applications built on top of TCP/IP are provided with a point-to-point channel that can be used to transmit arbitrary information. This approach has served quite satisfactorily for many years, but it no longer suits some of the new communication paradigms currently being used on the Internet [1]. Nowadays, most Internet applications are no longer interested in using a point-to-point channel to exchange traffic between two endpoints. In contrast, what they really want is to access information that is available in the other network nodes. Information-centric networks (ICNs) offer a service where users can directly obtain pieces of information, regardless of their location. This service is more suited to current network uses and to support the highly dynamic nature of mobile networks. Additionally, the legacy point-to-point communication model can be provided on top of it, if so desired. Named data networking (NDN) is an implementation of ICN that has emerged as a promising candidate for future Internet architecture. In contrast to traditional networking protocols, NDN focuses on the content itself, rather than on its location. NDN enables name-based routing and location-independent data retrieval [2]. This Special Issue, titled \"Recent Advances in Information-Centric Networks (ICNs)\", aims to highlight and to present recent advances about different problems related to using information-centric network architecture. It contains nine high-quality research papers and one review paper. As usual, the _Future Internet_ journal standards required that all the submitted manuscripts went through a rigorous peer-review process. In the following, we will use the authors' own words to avoid misinterpretation and to provide a more accurate presentation of the contributions of each paper. The work by [PERSON] and [PERSON] (contribution 1), titled \"An In-Network Cooperative Storage Schema Based on Neighbor Offloading in a Programmable Data Plane\", was the first published paper in this Special Issue. Numerous studies have been conducted on distributed storage in academia and industry, but most storage systems are constructed at the application layer. As a result of the recent development of programmable network technology, solutions have been developed that use in-network computing to offload part of the storage function into the network [3]. This paper proposes the realization of data storage in the forwarding process and the cooperative offloading of the data beyond the local storage capacity to neighboring storage nodes. The proposed solution consists of dynamically splitting traffic among selected neighbor nodes to sequentially amortize excess traffic. The neighbor selection mechanism is based on the Local Name Mapping and Resolution System, in which the node weights are computed through combining the link bandwidth and the node storage capability and determining whether to split traffic via comparing normalized weight values with thresholds. Evaluation shows that the proposed schema is more efficient compared with end-to-end transmission and ECMP in terms of bandwidth usage and transfer time. In the second contribution, titled \"Controlling the Trade-Off between Resource Efficiency and User Satisfaction in NDNs Based on Naive Bayes Data Classification andLagrange Method\", [PERSON] et al. address the trade-offs between resource efficiency and user satisfaction in the limited environments of named data networks (NDNs). The authors propose a strategy, named RADC (resource allocation-based data classification), which aims to manage such trade-offs through controlling the fairness index of the system.