Communications, caching, and computing for content-centric mobile networks: part 1 [guest editorial].

The driving forces behind the exponential growth in mobile cellular network traffic have fundamentally shifted from the steady increase in demand for conventional \"connection-centric\" communications, such as phone calls and text messages, to the explosion of \"content- centric\" communications, such as video streaming and content sharing. The Cisco Visual Networking Index projects that video traffic will amount to 72 percent of global mobile data traffic by 2019. The mobile cellular network architectures of today are, however, still designed with a connection-centric communication mindset. Moreover, the myriad technological advances proposed for beyond fourth generation (4G) and 5G mobile networks still mostly focus on capacity increase, which is fundamentally constrained by the limited radio spectrum resources as well as the diminishing investment efficiency for operators, and therefore will always lag behind the growth rate of mobile traffic. It can be argued that the logjam in cellular networks cannot be addressed by improving connection capability alone, but instead must be tackled by fundamentally addressing the underlying ineffectiveness of the current communication architecture for massive content delivery.