7th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2020)

Call for Papers

The organizing committee is delighted to invite you to submit your work for presentation at the 7th ACM conference on Information Centric Networking (ICN 2020), to be held in Montreal, Canada, September 28-30, 2020.

ACM ICN 2020 is a single-track conference focusing on significant research contributions to ICN as broadly defined, and featuring paper presentations, posters, and demonstrations.

ICN deals with all aspects of an information- or data-centric approach toward supporting networked applications. Such an approach treats digital objects (i.e., collections of bits) as first-class objects, and supports identification, creation, retrieval, authentication, and access control for such objects through a global service.

ACM ICN 2020 solicits research contributions across the full spectrum of technologies and architectures related to ICN, including work that advances core ICN concepts, architectures, technologies, and capabilities; extends current ICN concepts to new networking environments and use cases; realizes, demonstrates, and quantifies the benefits of ICN in traditional and emerging application domains; and catalyzes, incentivizes, simplifies, and supports ICN deployments in realistic, operational environments and settings.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Development, refinement, and extension of existing ICN architectures;
Design and implementation of global and local information-centric approaches, including named-data, publish-subscribe, and distribution-oriented systems
Global routing, forwarding, and caching for information-centric networks
Feature advancement of ICN including policing, QoS, multimedia transport, and adaptive network functions
ICN implementation approaches based on software-defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), or other emerging technologies
Experiences with application of information-centric networking and computation in various domains such as Internet-of-things, personal communications, public content distribution/exchange, etc.
Information-centric networking as an approach in mobile or constrained environments including 5G and network slicing, vehicular networking, autonomous driving, and machine-to-machine communication
Information-centric solutions for integrating big data platforms and machine learning frameworks
AI/ML techniques to support ICN networks management
Approaches to coexistence/evolution of information-centric and host-centric networking, including IP-based protocols in support of information-centric operations
Virtualization, operation, and orchestration of named network resources including forwarding, storage, computation, and the distributed Web
Platforms allowing specification of computations on data, and orchestration of such computations, including named computing functions at the network edge
Software design and architectures to support ICN including testing and verification
Information-centric network management including zero-conf bootstrapping
Measurement and analysis of protocols, applications, and infrastructure for distribution of named content
Security services including confidentiality and access control, authentication, and non-repudiation, as well as infrastructure resilience
Privacy of consumers and producers of content objects
Namespace management approaches, case studies, and empirical evaluation campaigns
Incentives, money flow, and other sociotechnical aspects of information-centric networking.

Submission Details

The conference solicits both full and short papers. Submissions will be reviewed through a double-blind process, and evaluated on the basis of intellectual merit, originality, importance of contribution to the field, soundness and strength of evaluation (for full papers), quality and clarity of presentation, and appropriate comparison to related work.

Full papers may be up to 10 pages in length, excluding references, following the ACM SIGCOMM format (10pt font, sigconf option for acmart style), and should convey the results of mature research. Short papers may be up to 6 pages in length, excluding references.

Short papers should illustrate important challenges or promising new lines of research in the realm of ICN, either through the presentation of illuminating early research results or through the vehicle of a well-reasoned and thought-provoking position statement. Short papers will be evaluated primarily on their ability to contribute to the future evolution of ICN research in light of the goals described above.

Submission Instructions

If your paper is accepted, we will provide further information for the camera-ready version.

If you have any questions about submitting papers to ICN 2020, or encounter problems with the paper submission site, contact the TPC chairs before the deadline.

Submission and Publication Compliance Policies

Papers submitted for consideration must not have been already published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere during the consideration period. Specifically, authors are required to adhere to the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the ACM Policy on Prior Publication and Simultaneous Submissions.

Like other conferences and journals, ICN prohibits violation of the above ACM Policies and may take action against authors who violate them. In some cases, the program committee may share information about submitted papers with other conference chairs and journal editors to ensure the compliance of papers under consideration. If the TPC discovers a violation of these principles, sanctions may include, but are not limited to, contacting the institutions of the authors and publicizing the details of the case.

ICN will review extended versions of previously-published short preliminary papers (such as workshop papers) in accordance with published ACM SIGCOMM policies. Papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement requests will not be considered.

Paper Anonymity

All submitted papers will be judged based on their quality and relevance through double-blind reviewing, where the identities of the authors are withheld from the reviewers. As an author, you are required to make a good-faith effort to preserve the anonymity of your submission, while at the same time allowing the reader to fully grasp the context of related past work, including your own. Common sense and careful writing will go a long way towards preserving anonymity. Minimally, please take the following steps when preparing your submission:

Remove the names and affiliations of authors from the title page.
Remove acknowledgment of identifying names and funding sources.
Use care in naming your files. Source file names (e.g., “Alice-n-Bob.dvi”) are often embedded in the final output as readily accessible comments.
Check the “Properties” (metadata) embedded in the file, and remove any identifying information before submitting.
Use care in referring to related work, particularly your own. Do not omit references to provide anonymity, as this leaves the reviewer unable to grasp the context. Instead, reference your past work in the third person, just as you would any other piece of related work by another author.
Work that extends an author’s previous workshop paper is welcome, but the paper should (a) acknowledge their own previous workshop publications with an anonymous citation and (b) carefully explain the differences between the ACM ICN’20 submission and the prior workshop paper.

Conflicts of interest

Both authors and TPC members must identify conflicts of interest according to the following general principles.

A program committee member (including the chairs of the committee) is considered to have a conflict of interest on a submission that has an author in any of the following categories: the person himself or herself; a past or current student or academic advisor; a supervisor or employee in the same line of authority within the past four years; a member of the same organization (e.g., company, university, government agency, etc.) within the past four years or in the near future (six months); a co-author of a paper appearing in publication within the past four years; someone with whom there has been a financial relationship (e.g., grants, contracts, consultancies, equity investments, stock options, etc.) within the past four years; someone with whom acceptance or rejection would further the personal goals of the reviewer (e.g., a competitor); a member of the same family or anyone considered a close personal friend; or someone about whom, for whatever reason, their work cannot be evaluated objectively. If there is no basis for the TPC conflicts provided by authors, however, those conflicts will be removed. Do not improperly indicate conflicts simply to prevent some TPC members from reviewing your paper.

Important dates

~~May 15, 2020~~ May 29, 2020

Paper Registration Deadline (Long and Short)
~~May 22, 2020~~ June 5, 2020

Paper Submission Deadline (Long and Short)
~~August 1, 2020~~

Acceptance Notification
~~September 1, 2020~~

Camera Ready Due
September 29, 2020 - October 1, 2020

Virtual Conference

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.