Call for Papers

The communication technologies used for Internet connectivity have radically changed since the 1980s, when the current design of the TCP/IP stack was introduced. Most of the traffic will soon be generated by mobile devices, connected to different generations of wireless Local Area Networks and cellular networks, which now can provide to end users a multi-gigabit-per-second data rate.  Mobile devices are more and more heterogeneous, and support connectivity over different interfaces and networks. Similarly, the capacity of fixed and backhaul networks has dramatically increased, thanks to advances in optical communications.

These advances in networking have facilitated the development of new applications, such as Virtual and Augmented Reality, Cloud Gaming, and Industry 4.0, among others, that impose stringent end-to-end performance requirements on networks, in terms of, for example, throughput, latency, and reliability. This, along with the increased heterogeneity of the network, has called for an evolution of decades-old transport layer paradigms, bringing the transport layer to the spotlight once again. Indeed, the end-to-end performance and the quality of the service perceived by the users does not depend only on the capabilities of the communication technologies, but also on the interaction among the network, the applications, and the transport layer. Therefore, there has been a recent renewed interest in the design and performance evaluation of new transport protocols, congestion control mechanisms, and solutions to maximize the end-to-end performance of next-generation wireless and wired networks.

This Feature Topic (FT) aims at investigating recent advances at the transport layer that will satisfy the performance requirements of future applications over recent and future networks in the next decade.

Notably, we look for contributions from researchers from academia and industry on three main thrusts: (i) the design and proposal of new transport protocols, which can represent an alternative to the common Transmission Control Protocol (TCP); (ii) the evolution of congestion control techniques, considering also in-network performance enhancing proxies, cross-layer, and/or Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) approaches; and (iii) the introduction of multipath capabilities at the transport layer. Prospective authors are invited to submit original, high-quality contributions, which comply with IEEE Communications Magazine guidelines, in the following areas:

• Requirements for transport protocols in future networking scenarios
• New trends and results in congestion control (e.g., AI/ML-based approaches, strategies for low latency and high reliability, cross-layer and multi-hop control, among others)
• QUIC: protocol design, performance evaluation, possible enhancements
• Multipath approaches for transport protocol: design, path selection, performance evaluation
• Congestion control for multipath transport protocols
• Design, optimization, and performance of transport protocols for 5G and 6G networks
• In-network solutions for transport performance enhancement (e.g., performance enhancing proxies)
• Standardization and development efforts

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the Information for Authors section of the Manuscript Submission Guidelines. Please, check these guidelines carefully before submitting since submissions not complying with them will be administratively rejected without review.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Manuscript Central. Select the “April 2021/Transport Layer” topic from the drop-down menu of Topic/Series titles. Please observe the dates specified here below noting that there will be no extension of submission deadline.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 8 October 2020, 4:00 pm NYC time (EDT)
Acceptance Notification: 1 January 2021
Final Manuscript Due: 15 February 2021
Publication Date: April 2021

Guest Editors

Michele Polese
Northeastern University, Boston, MA

Peyman Teymoori
University of Oslo, Norway

Jing Zhu
Intel, Portland, OR