Call for Papers

Motivation

It has been widely acknowledged that there is a gap between the networking research conducted in the industry and that performed by professors and students in the universities.  This gap is partially caused by the different goals of the two parties.  Researchers in the industry may focus more on the technology transfer side for offering better services and thus improving revenue for their companies.  Academic researchers may tend to focus more on the intellectual challenges of either theoretical or practical problems, and advance the state-of-the-art with novel algorithms, protocols, and architectures, without worrying about issues such as commercialization. Moreover, usually there is limited access for academia to understand and appreciate the pain points of operating production networks and offering networking service at scale, and limited access to the non-public resources owned by private enterprises for more effective research (e.g., operational data of a network), due to the lack of broad collaborations between the industry and academia. On the other hand, we have witnessed multiple successful cases where academia, government, and private enterprise worked together to commercialize some extraordinary ideas into real products. Our Internet may be arguably the most victorious story along this line, which was originally sponsored by the United States Department of Defense as ARPANET to connect a few computers at universities.

The goal of this Special Issue (SI) is to bridge the above mentioned gap, by promoting and maximizing the outcome of research collaborations between industry and academia, for example, through summer internships and funded research by companies conducted at universities. It is motivated by the fact that the networking industry has been actively bridging such gap through numerous collaborative research and open source collaborations, for improving the research-technology transfer. Submissions to this SI should be about research activities jointly contributed by academia and industry, and should include concrete evidence about the research collaboration.  We welcome technical papers addressing practical challenges faced by the industry that are jointly tackled with complementary contributions from both sides, and papers illustrating use cases behind the technical issues which are under consideration by the industry.  We encourage authors who submit a paper to this SI to carry out performance evaluations using platforms and infrastructures provided by the industry. We especially encourage submissions whose lead author is a student (either graduate or undergraduate) to disseminate and advertise experimental results of technical achievements during summer internships or through collaborations with industrial researchers. We will also consider position papers from joint academia and industry authors which illustrate the existing gap and possible solutions to bridge it.

Topics of Interests

The scope of this SI is broad. It covers all aspects of networking research. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• AI and machine learning for networking
• Cloud-native technology for cellular networks
• Communication and computing over big data on networked systems
• Embedded and energy-harvesting sensor applications and systems
• Energy-efficient computing in networked systems
• Experience with deployed networked systems
• Highly available and reliable networked systems
• Long-range/Low-power wide-area wireless networking
• Low latency deterministic networking
• Managing, debugging, and diagnosing problems in networked systems
• Mobile cellular networks (5G and beyond)
• Network and workload measurement systems
• Networking aspects of datacenters, cloud computing, and edge computing
• Networking optimizations for distributed AI and machine learning systems
• Network resource allocation for efficient federated learning
• Programmable networks and transport protocols
• Robotic and drone-based networking
• Security and privacy of networked systems
• Self-organizing, autonomous, and federated networked systems
• Systems and networking support for virtual or augmented reality
• Ubiquitous computing and mobile human-computer interaction
• Wireless networked systems
• Virtualization and resource management for networked systems

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the ‘Information for Authors’ section of the Paper Submission Guidelines.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Manuscript Central. Select "January 2022/Bridging the Gap between Industry and Academia for Networking Research" from the drop-down menu of topic titles.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 15 June 2021 15 July 2021
Initial Decision Notification: 1 August 2021
Revised Manuscript Due: 1 September 2021
Final Decision Notification: 1 October 2021
Final Manuscript Due: 1 November 2021
Publication Date: January 2022

Guest Editors

Jiasi Chen
University of California, Riverside, USA

Tian Guo
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA

Bo Han
George Mason University, USA

Sung-Ju Lee
KAIST, South Korea

Viswanathan Swaminathan
Adobe Research, USA

Stylianos I. Venieris
Samsung AI, UK

Ying Zhang
Facebook, USA