AUGUST 17-21
BARCELONA, SPAIN
It is our great pleasure to welcome you to Barcelona, Spain for SIGCOMM 2009, the flagship conference of the ACM SIG on Data Communications!
With great enthusiasm we have put together for you a rich and varied technical program that includes 27 full-length papers that will be presented over three days; a keynote talk by the SIGCOMM Award winner, Jon Crowcroft; the announcement of the SIGCOMM Test-of-Time Award; five one-day workshops that range from research on enterprise networks (WREN) to new forums on programmable routers and virtualization (VISA, PRESTO), online social networks (WOSN) and mobile systems and applications (MobiHeld); and two unique sessions with 19 posters and 23 demonstrations that highlight promising early-stage research. It is a packed program, full of intellectually stimulating forums, each of which has the potential of leading to new important breakthroughs.
This year we have made a significant effort to maintain registration costs low, while providing a high quality and dense social program. We are very excited about introducing a couple of new things at SIGCOMM 2009. In particular, we are making a special effort regarding demos. We believe demos can be a huge opportunity to bring ideas to life, spark a lot of discussions and debate, and bring industry more closely in contact with research. As a result, we have significantly improved the demo sessions providing all participants with large displays and a spacious demo area where they can highlight their work. We are also going "green" by providing all papers online before the event and a few copies at the conference venue rather than printed proceedings. Finally, we are organizing an open community interest session which will occur parallel with the poster and demo sessions.
SIGCOMM 2009 is located in downtown Barcelona, a vibrant, young, and bustling urban city set in the midst of the beautiful Mediterranean. We encourage you to visit this sophisticated and stylish city and to get you started we invite you to attend our Welcome Reception at the Plaza Hotel, which provides great views of the Montjuc fountains and the National Art Museum of Catalonia. Our banquet will be held on top of the Montjuc mountain, with spectacular views over the city.
Organizing a large conference is a substantial undertaking, and our heartfelt thanks go to our team which made this event possible. We thank Dina Papagiannaki and Luigi Rizzo for leading a highly accomplished and dedicated program committee. We thank Dolors Sala for diligently handling a large number of local arrangements and Christophe Diot for sharing his good experience and wise advice. We thank Balachander Krishnamurthy and Ant Rowstron for organizing the workshops, and Nick Feamster and Renata Teixeira for leading the poster and demonstration committee. Also, we wish to thank: Dejan Kostic for thoroughly managing all publication matters, Moritz Steiner for creating our website with great responsiveness; Jordi Domingo and Athina Markopoulou for leading the travel grant committee; Laurent Mathy and Joel Sommers for handling publicity; Jau C. de Oliveira for providing the collective help in all matters; Javier Aracil for handling registration; Sue Moon for fundraising support; Serge Fdida for arranging the community interest session, and last but not least the ACM HQ staff with whom working has been a pleasure.
We are particularly appreciative of our supporters for enabling us to provide you with a first-rate experience and making it accessible to a wide range of attendees. Telefonica, Spanish Government, Cisco, NEC, Microsoft Research, Google, AT&T, Thomson, HP, Intel, Nokia, and Koren all generously contributed to SIGCOMM 2009, and the NSF, Euro-NF and ACM (SIGCOMM) provided additional travel support. Because of these funds we were able to provide a large travel program to help attendees who would otherwise find it difficult to attend. The travel grant committee awarded approximately 66 grants (selected out of 172 applications) to a diverse group of students, postdocs, researchers and faculty.
Pablo Rodriguez SIGCOMM 2009 General Chair Telefonica Research |
Ernst Biersack SIGCOMM 2009 General Chair Eurecom |
It is a great pleasure to welcome you all to Barcelona and to a rewarding week of immersion in the very best research work in the field of networking.
Sigcomm is an extremely selective conference and this year was no exception: we received 267
submissions, out of which 27 were selected for publication. Authors worked very hard to submit
high quality papers, and we want to thank them all. The selection of the final program would
not have been possible without the help of 60 highly dedicated and skilled Technical Program
Committee members, who worked over a period of 10 weeks producing almost one thousand
reviews and a similar number of comments. Our thanks goes to them as well.
Traditionally, this space is used to describe the paper selection process. We strongly believe in
the value of increasing visibility into the procedures underlying the conference, so this year we put
together a more complete description of the process followed. You can find it in the July09 issue
of Computer Communication Review (CCR), together with some properly anonymized data from
the paper management system.
This gains us space for a few comments on the technical content of this years program. Networking
is a rapidly evolving discipline. As with every area of research we do see it addressing
a number of topics that have reached maturity, and others that are just starting to attract interest.
Looking at the papers in this years program, we clearly see two topics dominating the scene:
wireless and data center.
Wireless networking is not a new topic but still a very active one. Among other things, this week
we will hear about research that tries to provide increased capacity through the use of interference
alignment and cancelation, directional antennas and new frequency bands.
Networking research in the area of data centers, however, is relatively new. Presentations will
cover a variety of approaches that explore mixes of topology, switch and end-node cooperation to
scale and offer full bisection bandwidth at reasonable cost.
Interestingly, we also see a number of papers in this years program that incorporate the effect of
novel networking constraints, such as energy, and end user security. Lastly, network measurement
and network management are long standing parts of our technical program. With the convergence
of services on top of a unified IP infrastructure, troubleshooting of performance problems is likely
to get more and more complex. This years program features solutions in performance diagnosis
and root cause analysis that target enteprise networks and IPTV services.
We really hope you will enjoy the technical program of ACM Sigcomm 2009 and we expect to see
lively discussions around the latest achievements of our community. Remember that papers are
available through CCR Online, where discussions can continue after the conference.
Luigi Rizzo SIGCOMM 2009 PC Chair Università di Pisa |
Dina Papagiannaki SIGCOMM 2009 PC Chair Intel Research |