Chairs' Messages
General Chairs' Message
On behalf of the organizing committee, we are delighted to welcome you to the Seventh ACM International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies in Tokyo, Japan. CoNEXT is one of the premier venues for fostering international scientific and technical exchange across research communities in networking. It encourages open discussions on networking topics and strives to accommodate a wide range of viewpoints and research approaches.
We are particularly proud to be holding CoNEXT for the first time in Asia. In doing so, we hope to provide an opportunity for the community to learn more about unique aspects of networking and the Internet in Asia, while at the same time allowing Asian researchers to participate in one of the most highly regarded conferences in the field.
As you all know, while the conference was in its preparation phase in March 2011, the region experienced the Japan Earthquake and the subsequent failures of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. These events raised serious concerns about holding the conference in its planned location. The organizing committee, in consultation with the CoNEXT Steering Committee, carefully weighed the pros and cons of moving the conference. These efforts included taking and evaluating a survey of the CoNEXT community, and considering safety assessments by various authorities. In May, the organizing committee and the steering committee decided that the conference would go on in Tokyo as planned. We are pleased to note that the community has responded in support of the conference, as evidenced by the large number of paper submissions and conference registrations this year.
This year's edition of CoNEXT continues its tradition of fostering scientific and technological exchange among different networking research communities across both academia and industry. The main conference is preceded by two topical workshops (the Workshop on Internet of Things and Service Platforms, and the Special Workshop on the Internet and Disasters). This year CoNEXT also continues its very popular Student Workshop, where the next generation of researchers present their recent achievements in an open and informal environment.
CoNEXT strives to be an affordable conference and we are happy to have kept registration fees unchanged for the fourth consecutive year — despite the challenges posed by unfavorable currency exchange rates and an economic climate adverse to industrial support. In that regard, we are particularly grateful to our corporate sponsors. These consist of our Gold supporter: Cisco; our Silver supporters: NEC, Technicolor and Telefonica; our Bronze supporters: IIJ and Toyota ITC; and our Patrons: the University of Tokyo and the WIDE Project. We thank the National Science Foundation and SIGCOMM for providing generous support for student travel grants, which allowed us to fund 28 students to attend the conference.
It takes a lot of hard work from a lot of dedicated people to make a conference like CoNEXT possible. We are deeply thankful to all members of the organizing committee, who volunteered their time to help with the preparation of the conference. Constantine Dovrolis and Peter Key assembled a Program Committee of the highest caliber and shepherded the process of selecting a very exciting program consisting of 30 papers across 8 sessions. We are especially grateful to Kensuke Fukuda for his invaluable help with local arrangement tasks; Zihui Ge, our publication and publicity chair; our workshop chairs who worked very hard to create and organize the three workshops; T. S. Eugene Ng, who oversaw the student travel grant process; Hirochika Asai, for taking care of the numerous website update requests in such a timely fashion; and Yuji Sekiya, for providing Internet connectivity at the venue. A huge thanks is also due to our student volunteers, who dedicated countless hours before, during and after the conference.
We also would like to acknowledge the help and support we have received from the Steering Committee, and especially from Roch Guerin, who kept the larger objectives of CoNEXT in constant focus. We thank the leadership of ACM SIGCOMM for its continuous support and sponsorship of this conference, and also acknowledge the help and guidance we received from ACM, especially from April Mosqus, Stephanie Sabal, Fran Spinola, and Adrienne Griscti. And finally, most of all we thank all the authors who submitted their excellent work to this conference, allowing us to assemble an outstanding program.
We extend a warm welcome to all attendees. We hope that in this city that is so steeped in a rich history of debate and innovative thinking, the presentations at CoNEXT 2011 will stimulate a new set of important discussions and ideas.
Kenjiro Cho, IIJ/Keio University, Japan
Mark Crovella, Boston University, USA
ACM CoNEXT 2011 General Co-Chairs
Program Chairs' Message
Welcome to ACM CoNEXT 2011 and Tokyo! This is the seventh ACM CoNEXT (COnference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies) conference, and the first to be held in Asia.
In the main technical program we are delighted to have 30 strong papers, covering a healthy variety of topics. As in previous years, the selection process was highly competitive. We received 159 submissions. The selection was handled by our TPC (Technical Program Committee). The TPC consists of 50 experts from 16 different countries. In the first round of the process, all papers were reviewed by at least three TCP members, none of whom had any connection with the authors. Following that initial round of reviews, 109 papers went through the second phase of reviews and discussion, where each paper received two additional reviews (making five reviews in total). In some cases additional reviews were sought from specialists outside the TPC. The final paper selection was made at the TPC meeting held in Atlanta in September 2011, which was attended by 30 TPC members. Each accepted paper was assigned a shepherd, to help the authors take into account feedback from the reviews and the TPC meeting discussion.
The technical program comprises eight sessions, organized into six topics: Wireless, Routing and Traffic Engineering, Measurement and Modeling, Economic and Energy Issues, New Protocols and Architectures, Routers and Net Management. Any such topic characterization is imprecise, and indeed many papers touch on several topics. Conference programs necessarily lag shifts in research direction, however some trends are apparent from the submissions and the final program: research on P2P has tailed off, Wireless continues to be a strong field, with papers on White Spaces appearing more often, while Economics and Energy Issues are growing areas.
This year we included a new topic “Applications of network science in communication networks” to the list of relevant topics for the conference Call-for-Papers to reflect the changing nature of network research and to stimulate submissions in that area. Indeed, the dynamic nature of the networking research agenda is also reflected in the topic of our opening Keynote “Death, Taxes, Advertising and Tracking”, which will be given by Dr. Paul Francis of MPI. It is a special pleasure to have Paul Francis as our keynote speaker.
After the TPC meeting, a subcommittee of TPC members was formed to select the winner of the best paper award. After examining in more detail three papers, the committee decided that this year's award will be given to the paper “Rapid Detection of Maintenance Induced Changes in Service Performance”, co-authored by Ajay Mahimkar, Zihui Ge, Jia Wang, Jennifer Yates, Yin Zhang, Joanne Emmons, Brian Huntley, and Mark Stockert. Congratulations to all of them for this great distinction!
To complete the Technical Program, we have organized a Panel discussion on “Interdisciplinary opportunities for networking researchers”, which also resonates well with CoNEXT's commitment to a dynamic and ever-changing research agenda.
In addition to the technical program, we are fortunate to have three workshops held in conjunction with CoNEXT. The first workshop, co-chaired by Kazunori Takashio, Jean Philippe Vasseur and Toru Hasegawa is IoTSP 2011 (workshop on Internet of Things and Service Platforms) that focuses on the design and architectural issues to build service platforms for an Internet of things and interconnected smart objects. The second is a Special Workshop on the Internet and Disasters, co-chaired by Paul Francis, Bradley Huffaker and Akira Kato, looking at the role of Internet and mobile communications when large disasters strike; particularly poignant and apposite given the earthquake and tsunami in Japan earlier this year. The third is a Student Workshop co-chaired by Hyun-chul Kim, Dimitrios Koutsonikolas and Costin Raiciu that offers us a glimpse into the future of our community.
Special thanks to all authors who submitted papers, and to the workshop organizers; it is the quality of their work that sets the conference standards so high. The Technical Program Committee plays a crucial role in assuring the quality of the conference, and we are extremely grateful for the dedication and effort they put into reviewing and shepherding papers. We are grateful to the General Chairs, Kenjiro Cho, and Mark Crovella, for their assistance and advice. We would also like to thank the CoNEXT Steering Committee for their many helpful suggestions. They provided essential context that often spared us from learning things the hard way. Finally, we would like to thank our sponsors, and especially ACM SIGCOMM, for their continued support of CoNEXT.
We trust that you will find the program stimulating and that the conference will provide you a valuable opportunity to interact with other researchers and practitioners from around the world.
Peter Key, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK
Constantine Dovrolis, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA
Program Co-chairs