Call for Papers

The Internet architecture and protocols have been very successful in the past decades, being simple and scalable with best-effort services. The endpoints recover errors and react to network congestion by retransmission and reducing the sending rate. In most web applications, consumers, in most cases human beings, can tolerate a certain level of service degradation. All these factors lead to the prosperity of today’s Internet.

When we look into the future, there are plentiful emerging network applications very sensitive to latency, jitter, loss rate, and/or flow-completion time. Unlike today’s web applications, the new applications are expected to serve some new “consumers”, which lack the capability to deal with service degradation as humans. For example, industrial applications are very sensitive to latency, jitter and loss. Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks require guaranteed network service with low latency and loss rate. Even with human consumers, emerging multimedia applications, such as holographic communication, immersive VR, AR and XR, telemedicine, remote surgery, and cloud gaming, require much more stringent network QoS, e.g., bounded latency and ultra-high throughput.

There are significant research challenges in satisfying these requirements. Research progress in multiple aspects of the network needs to be coordinated in a systematic way, including control plane orchestration and planning algorithms, data plane packet and flow scheduling algorithms, network architectures and protocols that coordinate endpoints and network devices.

Extensive research has been dedicated to satisfying time-sensitive applications. 5G and beyond-5G network architecture and air-interface technologies are optimized for Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) in 3GPP. The Time-Sensitive Network task force in IEEE and the Deterministic Networking working group in IETF are solving bounded latency problems in wired networks on layer 2 and layer 3, respectively. Edge computing architecture has been proposed to reduce latency by putting services close to clients. New transport layer protocols and algorithms are proposed to optimize flow completion time. Low latency and lossless flow and congestion control mechanisms are studied in datacenters for high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and big data analysis. Space-terrestrial integrated network can be used to reduce latency when two nodes are far from each other on the ground because light traverses faster in space than in fiber.

Now presents the pivotal moment to plan for the future, and evolve the network by innovating network architectures, protocols and algorithms for emerging time-sensitive applications.

This Special Issue presents and highlights advances in network architectures, protocols and algorithms for time-sensitive applications. The topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

• High-precision network forwarding for industrial Internet
• Bounded low latency technologies for telemedicine and tactile Internet
• 5G and beyond-5G network architecture and technologies for time-sensitive applications
• Bounded low-latency and high-throughput network forwarding and transport protocols for holographic communication and immersive VR, AR, and XR
• Network architectures and protocols enabling low-latency edge computing
• Space-terrestrial integrated network architecture, addressing, routing and protocols for low-latency communication
• Transport-layer protocols and algorithms for low latency and low flow completion time in the Internet
• Flow and congestion control mechanisms and protocols for low-latency data center networks to optimize forwarding latency, and flow/coflow completion time
• Fast authentication and key exchange algorithms and protocols to accelerate time-to-first-byte
• End-to-end time-sensitive networking technologies

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 the magazine’s Manuscript Central submission site. Select “March 2022/ New Network Architectures, Protocols and Algorithms for Time-Sensitive Applications” from the drop-down menu of Topic titles.

Important Dates

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

Guest Editors

Prof. Lin Cai
University of Victoria, Canada

Prof. Yang Chen
Fudan University, China

Prof. Pan Hui
University of Helsinki, Finland and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong

Prof. ‪Jean-Yves Le Boudec
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

Dr. Bingyang Liu
Huawei, China

Prof. Miguel Rio
University College London, UK