Call for Papers

Recently, the advancement of machine learning (ML) techniques, especially deep learning, reinforcement learning, and federated learning, has led to remarkable breakthroughs in a variety of application domains. The success of ML benefits from the advancement of Internet, mobile networks, data center networks, and IoT that facilitate data creation and sharing. On the other hand, we have also witnessed a fast growing trend in the networking community towards using ML to tackle challenging problems in network design, management, and optimization, which are traditionally addressed using mathematical optimization theory or human-generated heuristics. ML is also an essential ingredient in the realization of autonomous or self-driving networks.

Despite the wide successes of ML-related research in networking systems, there remain many challenges, such as the lack of open datasets, open-source toolkits and benchmark suites, reproducibility of the experiments, interpretability and robustness of the ML models, communication bottlenecks in distributed ML systems, etc. The objective of this Special Issue (SI) is to bring together the state-of-the-art research results of ML technology and its applications in networking systems. We welcome submissions from both academia and industry that address the fundamental challenges and opportunities in the interplay between ML and networking systems. The topics of interest of this Special Issue (SI) include, but are not limited to:

• Open datasets of networking systems for ML research
• Open-source ML software for networking systems
• Benchmark suites for ML research in networking systems
• ML for traffic prediction and classification
• ML for routing
• ML for congestion control
• ML for data center networks
• ML for network management
• ML for network security, including anomaly detection, intrusion detection, etc
• ML for software-defined networks
• ML for autonomous and self-driving networks
• ML for vehicular communication systems
• Big data analytics frameworks for networking data
• Network theory inspired by ML
• Interpretability and robustness of ML for networking systems
• Reinforcement learning for networking systems
• Federated learning for networking systems
• Networking performance optimization for ML applications and systems
• Collection communications for distributed ML
• Reproducibility of ML research in networking 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. 

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 20 January 2023
Initial Decision Notification: 15 March 2023
Revised Manuscript Due: 15 April 2023
Final Decision Notification: 15 May 2023
Final Manuscript Due: 31 May, 2023
Publication Date: July 2023

Guest Editors

Xiaowen Chu
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China

Shadi Ibrahim
INRIA, France

Jia Liu
The Ohio State University, USA

Shiqiang Wang
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA

Chuan Wu
The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

Rongfei Zeng
Northeastern University, China