  Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a recent paradigm that claims to
mitigate some limitations of the current IP-based Internet architecture. The
centerpiece of ICN is named and addressable content, rather than hosts or
interfaces. Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is a prominent ICN instance that
shares the fundamental architectural design with its equally popular academic
sibling Named-Data Networking (NDN). CCN eschews source addresses and creates
one-time virtual circuits for every content request (called an interest). As an
interest is forwarded it creates state in intervening routers and the requested
content back is delivered over the reverse path using that state.
  Although a stateful forwarding plane might be beneficial in terms of
efficiency, and resilience to certain types of attacks, this has not been
decisively proven via realistic experiments. Since keeping per-interest state
complicates router operations and makes the infrastructure susceptible to
router state exhaustion attacks (e.g., there is currently no effective defense
against interest flooding attacks), the value of the stateful forwarding plane
in CCN should be re-examined.
  In this paper, we explore supposed benefits and various problems of the
stateful forwarding plane. We then argue that its benefits are uncertain at
best and it should not be a mandatory CCN feature. To this end, we propose a
new stateless architecture for CCN that provides nearly all functionality of
the stateful design without its headaches. We analyze performance and resource
requirements of the proposed architecture, via experiments.
