Author Description

Communications and Networking, The integration of networking, caching and computing into one system becomes a natural trend. By incorporating caching functionality into the network, the system can provide native support for highly scalable and efficient content retrieval, and meanwhile, duplicate content transmissions within the network can be reduced significantly. As a consequence, mobility, flexibility, and security of the network can be considerably improved. On the other hand, the incorporation of computing functionality endows the network with powerful capabilities of data processing, hence enabling the execution of computationally intensive applications within the network. By offloading mobile devices' computation tasks to resource-rich computing infrastructures in the vicinity or in remote clouds, the task execution time can be considerably reduced, and the local resources of mobile devices, especially battery life, can be conserved, thus enriching the computing experience of mobile users. Moreover, networking, caching and computing functionalities can complement and reinforce each other by interactions. For instance, some of the computation results can be cached for future use, thus alleviating the backhaul workload. On the other hand, some cached content can be transcoded into other versions to better suit specific user demands, thus economizing storage spaces and maximizing the utilization of caching. Despite the potential vision of integrated networking, caching and computing systems, a number of significant research challenges remain to be addressed before widespread application of the integrated systems. Integrated Networking, Caching, and Computing address these challenges, including the latency requirement, bandwidth constraints, interfaces, mobility management, resource and architecture tradeoffs, convergence as well as non-technical issues such as governance regulations, etc. Particularly, it covers the resource allocation issue, in which the manag