U-NET '09

U-NET '09 — User-provided Networking: Challenges and Opportunities

The organizing committee is delighted to invite you to U-NET '09, co-located with CoNEXT 2009 in Rome, Italy.

Motivation

This workshop is dedicated to the debate of concepts, challenges, and opportunities concerning user-provided networking, i.e., scenarios where users cooperate by sharing wireless resources as well as Internet services. To provide a specific example that relates to Internet access (connectivity), the end-user (or a community of end-users) is a micro-operator in the sense that he/she shares his/her subscribed broadband Internet access based on some form of incentive scheme. In addition, the end-user may or may not provide other network functionality such as local mobility management, or persistent storage and forwarding services. This new role is disruptive in what concerns Internet service models, since there is no distinction between what is today known as end-user device and network device: in the future, end-user devices will actively participate as part of the network. In contrast, the Internet has been up to now mostly the means for end-users to obtain some form of network service, originally related to connectivity, person-to-person communication, or information retrieval. Such user-centric provider role is also disruptive given that the regular network boundaries of trust have to be extended in a way that should mimic social behavior: there is the need to form networks of trust in order to accommodate a robust network growth, given that the key to such growth is the willingness to cooperate.

Another disruptive aspect of user-provided networking is that due to the nature of the wireless media and the way that humans move, support for intermittent connectivity as well as fast and transparent roaming between micro-operators needs to be considered. Finally, and given that user-provided networking spreads dynamically having as network elements regular end-user devices, there is the need to consider cases where information is opportunistically relayed instead of routed based on topological information.

Due to the disruptive aspects mentioned, user-provided networking seem to have the potential to provide a paradigm shift in Internet communication models, given that such novel functionality allow wireless networks to operate in a completely autonomic way and also given that the end-user becomes a provider of Internet services (e.g. connectivity) based upon cooperation incentives or rewards and based upon his/her own mobility and social patterns. Services are established on the fly, and do not necessarily imply the use of multihop technology or routing. For instance, connectivity may be, in most cases, simply relayed.

The workshop program will include presentations of peer-reviewed papers and a discussion panel with guests from industry and academia. We envision U-NET as a forum aiming to ignite a debate concerning technical challenges and impact (negatively or positively) that user-provided networking may have on Internet communication models.

Topics

U-NET'09 solicits high quality technical contributions within the context of user-provided networking. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Challenges and opportunities for access providers. What is the impact of applying user-provided networking on current Internet wholesale models? How will this user-centric role influence the current virtual operator perspective? What is the impact of having neutral operator infrastructures (separation of transport and service provisioning), where a local-loop is based on user cooperation?
Impact on Internet architectures. Considering that the end-user is part of the network requires a paradigm shift from the end-to-end principle. What is the impact of not having a clear splitting between network and end-user devices?
Internet connectivity. Is connectivity relaying a robust mean to support transfer of information and if so, how good is it compared with multihop routing based on network-wide information? Do we need to manage large mesh networks, if users start to share available frequencies and bandwidth?
Trust models, incentives to share broadband access. Which incentives can be considered to build robust and secure large user-provided networks? Can reputation help? How to provide trust to users willing to share Internet access?
Human behaviour and mobility patterns. What is the impact that user-provided networking may have on human mobility patterns, and vice-versa? Would it be possible to devise a decentralized mobility management or an autonomic control of spreading factor and range by influence of human behaviour?
Self-organization. How can user-provider networks organized themselves taking advantage of human behaviour and highly dynamic surrounding conditions, while preventing surges of network load? Will it be possible to predict how many users will be hanging from a specific micro-provider at a time?
Wireless cooperation. User-provided networking rely on incentives for cooperation (e.g. connectivity and spectrum sharing), which may be the starting point to explore further cooperative methods (e.g. aiming to develop augmented routing, medium access, location management, scheduling and energy management).

Papers submitted are expected to be highly innovative and may incorporate early stage ideas; position papers (clearly identified as such) pointing to new directions and capable of generating discussion are also welcome. Submission must be original and not already published in any other conference proceeding or journal. Proceedings of the workshop will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

Technical Panel Discussion

U-NET'09 aims to be a forum to debate the technical challenges and impact of deploying user-provided networking technology. For this propose, this first edition of U-NET will host a technical discussion panel constituted by:

Shivendra S. Panwar, Professor at Polytechnic Institute of New York University, USA
James Kempf, Senior Architect at Ericsson Research, USA
David Kennedy, Director at Eurescom GmbH, Germany
Jordi Vallejo, CTO at FON Wireless Ltd, Spain
Dirk Trossen, Chief Researcher at BT Design and Innovation, United Kingdom

Submissions

Submitted papers must be at most 6 (six) pages long (including figures, tables and references) in the standard ACM double column format. All text must use font sizes of 10 points or larger. Longer submissions will not be reviewed. The review process is single-blind. Submissions will be done via EDAS at http://edas.info/N7753.

Important Dates

Submissions due	~~July 17, 2009~~ August 13th, 2009
Notification of acceptance	~~September 4th, 2009~~ September 21th, 2009
Camera ready version due	October 1st, 2009
Workshop date	December 1st, 2009

Program Committee

PC Chairs	Paulo Mendes	INESC Porto, Portugal
	Olivier Marcé	Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, France
Technical Program Committee	Rute Sofia	INESC Porto, Portugal
	André Zúquete	University of Aveiro, Portugal
	Vassilis Kostakos	University of Madeira, Portugal
	Jon Crowcroft	University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
	Cecilia Mascolo	University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
	Eiko Yoneki	University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
	Dirk Trossen	British Telecom Innovate, United Kingdom
	Prosper Chemouil	France Telecom, France
	Martin May	Thomson Paris Research Laboratory, France
	Karen Sollins	MIT, USA
	Lixia Zhang	UCLA, USA
	James Kempf	Ericsson Research, USA
	Dipankar Raychaudhuri	Rutgders University, USA
	Bernhard Plattner	ETH, Switzerland
	George Polyzos	Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
	Maria Papadopouli	FORTH/University of Creete, Greece
	Anand Prasad	NEC, Japan
	Gunnar Karlsson	KTH, Sweden
	Yevgeni Koucheryavy	Tampere University of Technology, Finland
	Marcus Brunner	NEC, Germany
	Petri Mähönen	RWTH Aachen University, Germany