1st ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Future of Internet Routing & Addressing (FIRA)

Workshop Program

Call for Papers

Applications are placing increasingly sophisticated demands on the network for better quality, more predictability, and greater reliability. Some of these applications are futuristic predictions (for example, holographic conferencing, and expansive virtual reality worlds), while others are already seeing real network demands (such as multi-player augmented- or virtual- reality games). This coincides with a growing trend to extend end-to-end communications to include machines, moving objects (such as cars), highly virtualized and replicated services or new environments (such as 5G), manufacturing, or space networking, while increasingly aiming at optimizing the operations of the particular networking environment in which the communication takes place. This has led to semantic enhancements to extend the most basic packet delivery mechanism, reflected in both routing and addressing behaviors, often specific to a particular use case and set of application traffic requirements or networking characteristics.

Despite this increasing plurality of communication scenarios, traditional IP-based addressing and network layer routing have remained focused on identifying location of communicating entities and determining suitable paths between those locations. This has previously been complemented by higher-layer capabilities (e.g., for name-to-location resolution) to support those comprehensive communication scenarios, but that approach introduces latency and dependencies (e.g., changing locator assignments may depend on the capabilities of the upper-layer capability that are outside the core addressing and routing system), while utilizing additional interpretations for the steering of traffic at the network layer may remove those drawbacks.

Many proposals have been made to go beyond basic locator-based routing, often adding information to IP packets or even entirely replace the current IP packet delivery architecture with a new one (which may or may not include IP-like packet delivery). The intent is always to facilitate enhanced routing decisions to provide differentiated behaviors for different packet flows distinct from simple shortest path first routing in basic IP packet delivery. Moreover, dedicated networking environments, such as data-centre networks, space networks, vehicular networks, CDNs and others have driven the creation of a plethora of solutions, each of which improves on routing and addressing within the requirements and specific behaviors that exist in those environments. RFC8799 captures this phenomenon as the proliferation of limited domains, all of which interconnect via the public Internet as we know it.

But routing and addressing has not only shown continued interest in the research community. Also continued public funding, with a recent announcement of the EU research & innovation framework programme "Horizon Europe" calling for work on 'improving data plane performance', as well as industry interest, with recent efforts to emphasize the role of networking in the upcoming 6G development (e.g., 6G Networking whitepaper, recent 6G Networking Symposium in Lisbon), show the interest of the wider community in this topic; an interest this workshop will be building on. However, this interest also poses a problem in that those many solutions have often been developed in isolation and without a larger and coherent architectural view of evolving the Internet as a whole.

The Future of Internet Routing and Addressing (FIRA) workshop aims at bringing these communities together with the intention of synthesizing a unified architectural view on how routing and addressing ought to evolve. In other words, FIRA is looking to investigate and expand the boundaries of what can be achieved by introducing new architectures rather than point solutions, those architectures extending existing or inventing new routing and addressing techniques that modify the default forwarding behavior to be based on other information present in the packet, said behavior being either configured policy or dynamically programmed into the routers and devices. These new forwarding behaviors aim at causing new and alternative path processing by routers, such as:

• Determinism of quality of delivery in terms of throughput, latency, jitter, drop precedence.
• Support for resilience in terms of survival of network failures and delivery degradation.
• Support for highly distributed, virtualized service execution environments, where route changes are aligned (in time) with the ability to establish new service execution points
• Improvement of routing performance in terms of the volume of data that has to be exchanged both to establish and to maintain the routing tables.
• Deployability in terms of configuration, training, development of new hardware/software, and interaction with pre-existing network technologies and uses.
• Efficiency of manageability in terms of, i. diagnostic management, ii. management of Service KPIs with/without guarantees, and iii. dynamic and controlled instantiation of management information in the packets.

The FIRA workshop also solicits work on use cases, design principles, architectures, techniques, implementations, and experience insights that address the highlighted objectives.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Architecture frameworks for multi-purpose routing
• Limited domain architectures
• Limited domain interconnection architectures
• Advances applications and use case analysis and requirements
• Goals and challenges in future and evolving routing and addressing schemes
• Routing on multiple optimality criteria
• Routing on semantic enhancements (including routing, addressing, and new encapsulations)
• Coordination of information and decisions across multiple domains (regions and technology layers)
• Routing based on formal routing algebras and regular expressions approaches
• Centralized routing architectures
• Integration with modern SDN architectures and protocols
• Programmable forwarding architectures
• Security analysis of semantic enhancements
• Impact of semantic enhancements on privacy
• Economic and game-theoretical analysis of enhanced network semantics
• Analysis on impact of enhanced routing semantics on net neutrality
• Commercial and strategic cost/benefit analyses
• Information and data models for adoption
• Stability design and analysis
• Experience and deployment

Submission Instructions

Submissions must be original, unpublished work, and not under consideration at another conference or journal. Submitted papers must be at most six (6) pages long, excluding references and appendices, in two-column 10pt ACM format. Papers must include author names and affiliations for single-blind peer reviewing by the PC. Authors of accepted submissions are expected to present and discuss their work at the workshop.

Please submit your paper via https://fira2022.hotcrp.com.

If you have any questions or problems with your submission, please get in touch with Dr. Daniel King (d.king@lancaster.ac.uk).

Important Dates

• May 11, 2022 May 25, 2022

  Submission deadline

• June 17, 2022

  Acceptance notification

• July 1, 2022

  Camera-ready deadline

Organizers

• Steering Committee (SC)

• Rui Aguiar

  Universidade de Aveiro

• Jon Crowcroft

  University of Cambridge

• Adrian Farrel

  Old Dog Consulting

• Technical Program Committee (TPC) Chairs

• Daniel King

  Lancaster University

• Dirk Trossen

  Huawei Technologies

• Ning Wang

  University of Surrey

• Technical Program Committee (TPC) Members

• Olivier Bonaventure

  Université Catholique de Louvain

• Med Boucadair

  Orange

• Randy Bush

  IIJ

• Philip Eardley

  British Telecom

• Paolo Giaccone

  Polito

• Joel Halpern

  Ericsson

• David Hutchison

  University of Lancaster

• Olufemi Komolafe

  Arista Networks

• Michal Krol

  City University

• Elliot Lear

  Cisco

• Tony Li

  Juniper

• Diego Lopez

  Telefonica

• David Lou

  Huawei Research Labs

• Adrian Perrig

  ETH

• Antonio Pescape

  University of Napoli

• Ioannis Psaras

  Protocol Labs

• Martin Reed

  Essex University

• Stefano Salsano

  CNIT

• Damien Saucez

  INRIA

• Stefano Secci

  CNAM

• Kohei Shiomoto

  Tokyo City University

• Jeff Tantsura

  Microsoft

• Laurent Toutain

  IMT Atlantique

• Ricard Vilalta

  Centre Tecnològic Telecomunicacions Catalunya

• Russ White

  Juniper

• Li Yizhou

  Huawei Research Labs