Motivating and describing the use of content-centric networks (CCNs) in the Smart Cities domain are the goals of this paper. In a CCN, users do not need to know where a given service is located; they only need to know its name, in contrast to the current transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) stack at the base of the web. This paper serves as a good introduction to the work in the area and provides several motivating examples.

The authors are right in pointing to an information-centric paradigm, or information/content-centric networks, as a promising set of technologies to access the vast number of services that a city has to offer. CCNs have the potential to solve many of the problems of the traditional TCP/IP stack, such as location independence, security, scalability, and fault tolerance, by using variations of publish/subscribe primitives, network caching, and encryption and authentication on the network layer. However, the authors describe the early design stages of their own work and do not discuss key issues that might advance the state of the art. In particular, what network topologies and caching strategies will enable real scalability and fault tolerance without hindering performance or security? How are services updated and published so that users can easily explore them? How is seamless support for mobile devices obtained when the output of the services is so varied, and who handles the conversion?

While this paper will give practitioners a nice overview of what’s being done in the area and a good understanding of the basic principles behind CCNs, it does not describe an original contribution or give insight into the challenges of a real-life implementation.