Capacity Sharing Workshop @ ACM CoNEXT 2012

December 10, 2012
Nice, France

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Capacity Sharing Workshop (CSWS) @ ACM CoNEXT 2012

The 2nd Capacity Sharing Workshop will be held on December 10th, 2012, in Nice, France. The 1st Capacity Sharing Workshop was held on October 13th, 2011, in Stuttgart Germany.

News

Objectives

Internet data traffic continues to grow rapidly. The challenge that operators face, especially in the mobile Internet, is to support more subscribers with higher bandwidth requirements. To meet the bandwidth demand, operators need to seek new technologies to efficiently utilize available network resources, in particular resource allocation and flow management.

In wireless networks, the problem is particularly relevant due to the inherently limited resources, which render a simple “throwing bandwidth at the problem” solution impossible. For example, IP traffic from mobile data is expected to double each year in the next years. The success of powerful mobile devices like smart phones or tablets to access different kind of Internet service is not only promoting the growth in traffic volume but also changing the traffic pattern. Certain applications automatically pull or push large amounts of data without the user necessarily being aware. Cloud-based applications transfer more and more data (sometimes even with real-time requirements). This strong growth and continual changes in the traffic characteristics and usage behavior raises questions on how to share limited capacity resources fairly and more efficiently.

With the variety of services one can find in today’s Internet, the requirements in rate, data volume and latency differ strongly. The current approach of fairness can not fulfill all kind of service demands. While e.g. background transmission like updates of software versions or status information can be shifted in time without any disadvantage for the user, there are also time-critical transmission like streaming that need a certain minimum rate at a certain time. The current aim of TCP congestion control (in the host) or weighted round robin (in the network) for sharing capacity equally between all concurrent flows or users at a bottleneck link does not work any longer. The potential for optimizing resource usage with respect to these different demands is not fully realised yet and perhaps needs a comprehensive consideration over different layers. As different resource allocation and adaptation mechanisms already exist in MAC, transport and application layer, we want to encourage researchers to consider integrated consideration of the problem space.

In commercially operated networks, traffic management is often used to react to observed congestion or disproportionate resource usage. Technically, traffic management has to deal with high-volume flows for video and bulk data distribution and with interactive communication patterns with low-latency requirements for interpersonal communication, thin-clients accessing cloud platforms etc. The challenge is to enable these different kinds of applications and to apply traffic management that maintains high degrees of resource utilization, a reasonable distribution of capacity without affecting transport protocol performance and impeding innovation. Such traffic management has to be able to adapt to innovation and be scalable with respect to growing traffic, growing numbers of flows, different application types etc. One of the questions that the workshop could address is whether and how Capacity Sharing can support traffic management evolving in this direction.

Data centers represent another environment where capacity sharing is required and implemented at different layers, for example with L2 QCN, DCTCP and SDN approaches such as OpenFlow.

With all these developments in applications and in networking technology, the question how to share the available resources in a fair, efficient and demand-oriented way becomes more and more prevalent.

For any questions please contact the Workshop Co-Chairs

Important dates

Abstract submission (extended) July 20, 2012 (old: July 13, 2012)
Paper submission (extended) August 03,2012 (old: July 20, 2012)
Acceptance notification September 25, 2012
Camera ready October 25, 2012
Workshop date December 10, 2012

Commitee

Workshop Co-Chairs Bob Briscoe BT Research & Technology, UK
  Mirja Kühlewind IKR, University of Stuttgart, Germany
  Dirk Kutscher NEC Laboratories Europe, Heidelberg, Germany