Modern networks increasingly rely on advanced network processing functions for a wide spectrum of crucial functions ranging from security (firewalls, IDSes, traffic scrubbers), traffic shaping (rate limiters, load balancers), dealing with address space exhaustion (NATs) or improving the performance of network applications (traffic accelerators, caches, proxies), to name a few. Such "network appliances" or "middleboxes" are a critical piece of the network infrastructure and represent, to a first-order approximation, the de-facto approach for network evolution in response to changing performance, security, and policy compliance requirements.
However, most of this functionality is implemented in costly, hard-to-modify dedicated hardware, making the network difficult to evolve or adapt to changing traffic requirements. Recent work seeks to address this issue by shifting network processing from a world of dedicated hardware to one built on software-based processing running on (sometimes virtualized and shared) platforms built on commodity hardware servers, switches, and storage. This vision of "software-based" network services enables new in-network functions to be rapidly instantiated, on-demand, and at places in the network where it is most needed, without having to modify the underlying hardware. The scope of this workshop focuses both on the design of the data plane to support advanced services as well as the control plane functions necessary to manage these advanced data plane functions. In some sense, this vision is complementary to ongoing efforts in the SDN community, where the focus has largely been on the control plane and assuming a commodity data plane.
While our workshop builds on the recent promise of realizing high-performance network processing on commodity hardware, many questions remain open:
The HotMiddlebox workshop will serve as an avenue to showcase and discuss ongoing work from both academic and industry efforts in this space and to identify key challenges and potential solutions, with the ultimate goal of providing a roadmap for practical deployment in operational networks.
We encourage the submission of work-in-progress papers in the area of middlebox design, implementation, measurement, management, and deployment. We look for submissions of previously unpublished work on topics including, but not limited to, the following:
Each submission must be a single PDF file no longer than six (6) pages in length (in two-column, 10-point format) including references, following the LaTeX style file. Papers should be submitted electronically via the submission site. Papers must include the author name and affiliation for single-blind peer reviewing by the program committee.
Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library. Publication at Hot Middlebox is not intended to preclude later publication of an extended version of the paper. Authors of accepted papers are expected to present their papers at the workshop.
| Submission | September 6, 11:59pm EST |
|---|---|
| Acceptance notification | October 6, 2013 |
| Camera ready | October 24, 2013 |
| Workshop date | December 9, 2013 |
| Workshop Co-Chairs | Felipe Huici | NEC Europe, UK |
|---|---|---|
| Vyas Sekar | Stony Brook University, USA |
| TPC Members | Aditya Akella | University of Wisconsin, USA |
|---|---|---|
| Katerina Argyraki | EPFL, SWITZERLAND | |
| Jon Crowcroft | Cambridge, UK | |
| Lars Eggert | NetApp, USA | |
| Norbert Egi | Huawei, USA | |
| Mark Handley | University College London, UK | |
| Giuseppe Lettieri | University of Pisa, ITALY | |
| Diego Lopez | Telefonica, SPAIN | |
| Anil Madhavapeddy | Cambridge, UK | |
| KyoungSoo Park | KAIST, SOUTH KOREA | |
| Peter Pietzuch | Imperial College, UK | |
| Sylvia Ratnasamy | UC Berkeley, USA | |
| Jennifer Rexford | Princeton University, USA | |
| Luigi Rizzo | University of Pisa, ITALY | |
| Anees Shaikh | IBM, USA | |
| Robin Sommer | ICSI, USA | |
| Nick Feamster | Georgia Institute of Technology, USA | |
| Julian Chesterfield | OnApp, USA | |
| Teemu Koponen | Nicira / VMware, USA | |
| Christian Maciocco | Intel Labs, USA | |
| Bob Briscoe | British Telecome, UK |