General Chairs' Welcome
It is our great pleasure to welcome you to Seattle, Washington for SIGCOMM 2008, the flagship conference of the ACM SIG on Data Communications!
With great enthusiasm and pride we have put together for you a rich and varied technical program that includes thirty six full-length papers that will be presented over three days; a keynote talk by the SIGCOMM Award winner, Don Towsley; the announcement of the SIGCOMM Test-of-Time Award; five one-day workshops that range from emerging communities (MobiArch, NetEcon, NSDR) to new forums on programmable routers and online social networks (PRESTO, WOSN); tutorials on the NetFPGA platform and spectral algorithms, and a unique session with 33 posters and 20 demonstrations that highlight promising early-stage research. It's a packed program, full of intellectually stimulating forums, each of which has the potential of leading to new important discoveries and breakthroughs.
We are very excited about introducing several new "firsts" at SIGCOMM 2008. We have expanded the poster session to include demonstrations. We have worked with the SIG to launch a SIGCOMM Best Paper award. We have modified the traditional Student Dinner to a Dinner with Students event, opening it up to anyone who desires to join the students for an informal dinner. We are videotaping all presentations professionally and will make them available to the community, and we are providing a "go green" registration option to allow attendees to opt out of printed proceedings and get a CDROM that contains all the conference proceedings.
SIGCOMM 2008 is located in the heart of Seattle, a vibrant, bustling urban city set in the midst of beautiful natural surroundings. We encourage you to take-in the sights and sounds of our beautiful region and to get you started we invite you to attend our Welcome Reception at the Olympic Sculpture Park, which provides a spectacular views of Puget Sound and the Olympic mountains. Our banquet will be held aboard a spacious modern cruise ship giving you a view of Seattle from the water and a closer view of the Sound.
Organizing a large conference is a substantial undertaking, and our heartfelt thanks go to our team which made this event possible. We thank Stefan Savage and Ion Stoica for leading a highly accomplished and dedicated program committee. We thank Ratul Mahajan for cheerfully and diligently handling a large number of local arrangements. We thank Suman Banerjee and Alex Snoeren for organizing the workshops and tutorials, and Dina Papagiannaki for leading the poster and demonstration committee. Also, we wish to thank: Tristan Henderson for creating our website with great responsiveness; Karen Sollins for leading the travel grant committee; Yin Zhang for handling publicity; Jau C. de Oliveira for providing the collective memory in all matters; Kenjiro Cho for fundraising support; and last but not least the ACM HQ staff with whom working has been a pleasure.
We are particularly appreciative of our supporters for enabling us to provide you with a first-rate experience and making it accessible to a wide range of attendees. Cisco, Intel, Microsoft Research, Sprint, Google, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, HP, Telefonica, IIJ, Nokia and IBM all generously contributed to SIGCOMM 2008, and the NSF and Euro-NF provided additional travel support. Because of these funds we were able to provide a large travel program to help attendees who would otherwise find it difficult to attend. The travel grant committee, led by Karen Sollins, awarded 44 grants to students and geographically diverse and minority faculty.
| Victor Bahl SIGCOMM 2008 General Chair Microsoft Research |
David Wetherall SIGCOMM 2008 General Chair Intel Research & University of Washington |
Program Chairs' Message
Welcome to the 2008 ACM SIGCOMM Conference! It has been our pleasure to organize and oversee the tremendous effort of this year's program committee in selecting the papers included here.
As in years past, SIGCOMM continues to attract large numbers of submissions. We received 288 papers this year, covering a wide array of topic areas. To accommodate both the load and diversity, we have continued the practice of maintaining a two-tiered PC, including 24 "light" members and 20 "heavy" members. "Light" members reviewed roughly 17 papers each on average, while "Heavy" members reviewed 25-30 papers and were responsible for attending the PC meeting. Every paper under consideration was reviewed by at least two distinct reviewers, over 75% were reviewed three times and the majority received four or more reviews (a small number of controversial papers had up to 6 reviews each). Thus, we only needed to solicit a handful of external reviews for area-specific knowledge (although several PC members were also aided by students or researchers at their institutions and we are grateful for their contributions as well).
The set of papers under consideration was winnowed down over multiple reviewing rounds and reviewers were encouraged to discuss and resolve areas of disagreement via the on-line review system in advance of the PC meeting. In spite of this preparation, almost 80 papers remained for discussion at the end of the online review process. The resulting marathon PC meeting, hosted at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, lasted well into the evening and identified 35 papers around which there was informed consensus. The resulting program covers a range of topics from data center architecture to low-level wireless protocol design, from incentives to network security. In turn, the paper authors represent 37 distinct institutions and reside in 7 countries. We hope you will find the papers selected to be stimulating, of broad interest, and worthy of your time and attention.
We wish to thank the many people who contributed time and energy to support this year’s SIGCOMM program. First, our thanks to the hundreds of authors whose chose to submit their research to SIGCOMM and, in so doing, keep our community vital. Second, we thank the members of the program committee who spent countless hours reading papers, writing reviews and debating one another over the course of several months. Third, there are a number of individuals who were particularly critical in making the review process work as smoothly as it did. We would like to thank Eddie Kohler who made a number of changes to his increasingly ubiquitous HotCRP reviewing package (usually turning around changes within a few hours), Geoff Voelker who helped incorporate his Banal PDF-checking software into HotCRP, Michael Vrable who deserves a medal for managing, maintaining, modifying, querying and generally owning the SIGCOMM review site and Christian Kreibich who was our scribe during the ICSI PC meeting and enabled us to provide feedback to authors about key discussion points. Finally, thank you for your attendance and we hope you enjoy the program and the conference!
| Stefan Savage SIGCOMM 2008 PC Chair UC San Diego |
Ion Stoica SIGCOMM 2008 PC Chair UC Berkeley |