Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is a novel networking paradigm centered around content distribution rather than host-to-host connectivity. This change from host-centric to content-centric has several attractive advantages, such as network load reduction, low dissemination latency, and energy efficiency. However, it is unclear whether today's technology is ready for the CCN (r)evolution. The major contribution of this paper is a systematic evaluation of the suitability of existing software and hardware components in today's routers for the support of CCN. Our main conclusion is that a CCN deployment is feasible at a Content Distribution Network (CDN) and ISP scale, whereas today's technology is not yet ready to support an Internet scale deployment.

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Most Information Centric Networking designs propose the usage of widely distributed in-network storage. However, the huge amount of content exchanged in the Internet, and the volatility of content replicas cached across the network pose significant challenges to the definition of a scalable routing protocol able to address all available copies. In addition, the number of available copies of a given content item and their distribution among caches is clearly impacted by the request forwarding policy.In this paper we gather initial design considerations for an ICN request forwarding strategy by spanning over two extremes: a deterministic exploitation of forwarding information towards a "known" copy and a random network exploration towards an "unknown" copy, via request flooding. By means of packet-level simulations, we investigate the performance trade-offs of exploitation/exploration approaches, and introduce an hybrid solution. Our forwarding scheme shows a good potential, whether carefully tuned, in terms of delivery performance, implicit cache coordination and possible reduction of forwarding table size.

During early 2020, the SARS-CoV-2 virus rapidly spread worldwide, forcing many governments to impose strict lockdown measures to tackle the pandemic. This significantly changed people's mobility and habits, subsequently impacting how they use telecommunication networks. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the COVID-19 emergency on a UK Mobile Network Operator (MNO). We quantify the changes in users' mobility and investigate how this impacted the cellular network usage and performance. Our analysis spans from the entire country to specific regions, and geodemographic area clusters. We also provide a detailed analysis for London. Our findings bring insights at different geotemporal granularity on the status of the cellular network, from the decrease in data traffic volume in the cellular network and lower load on the radio network, counterposed to a surge in the conversational voice traffic volume.