2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Future of Internet Routing & Addressing (FIRA)

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, immersive digital worlds, intelligent industry, telemedicine, automated agriculture, and sensory Internet), while existing applications are already seeing real network demands (such as multiplayer augmented- or virtual- reality games, industrial networking, and distributed AI). This overlaps with a growing trend to extend end-to-end communications to include highly computational processes (e.g., emergent intelligent application), machines and moving objects (such as autonomous cars and drones), while increasingly utilizing the ability to virtualize and replicate any network (digital twin) or service for improved efficiency and redundancy. Also, new environments, such as (beyond) 5G, manufacturing, or Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) pose new challenges to the requirements, such as time-variance of connectivity availability, At the same time, integrating connectivity with computational services is seen as another important consideration to improve the overall system’s efficiency and, ultimately, carbon footprint. This has led to many investigations to extend the most basic packet delivery mechanism that the Internet currently provides, reflected in both routing and addressing behaviors, often specific to a particular use case and thus addressing a specific set of application traffic requirements or networking characteristics.

Many proposals have been made to go beyond basic locator-based routing, often adding information to IP packets or even entirely replacing 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 and forwarding 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-center networks, space networks, vehicular networks, CDNs and others have driven the creation of a plethora of solutions, each of which improves routing and addressing within the requirements and specific behaviors of those environments. RFC8799 captures this phenomenon as proliferation of limited domains, interconnected via the public Internet as we know it.

Beyond the evolving purpose of communication systems, in the form of novel applications and novel network methods to accommodate them, a growing direction of work investigates the use of AI-based learning methods for finding ‘best’ (or better) ways to communicate, enhancing or even (partially) replacing established methods of protocol engineering and system operation.

Last year’s inaugural FIRA workshop showed firsthand the interest that the research community has in discussing their ideas and proposals for evolving the basic packet delivery capability of the Internet. A strong program of research works not only showed that routing and addressing is a key topic of research, but these discussions were directly bridged to engineering communities in the IETF and IRTF through side meetings and contributions, thus closing the gap between cutting edge research and opportunity for future engineering development that will lead to deployment.

Beyond the continued interest in the R&D community, public funding has increasingly focused on the development of new network solutions, particularly in the context of the accelerating developments for 6G. The successful start of the EU research & innovation framework programme "Horizon Europe" and its Smart Networks and Services (SNS) Joint Understanding, has seen first efforts in publicly funded network research being established, while upcoming funding rounds continue to call for work on 'improving data plane performance'. In addition, industry interest has continued to increase, within initial efforts such as the 6G Networking whitepaper and the inaugural 6G Networking Symposium in Lisbon, leading to the formation of the 6G Industry Association in Europe and counterparts in other regions of the world. The FIRA workshop will continue to build on this industry- and academia-spanning interest in novel network solutions. 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.

This year’s Future of Internet Routing and Addressing (FIRA) workshop aims to build on the success of last year’s event by soliciting experiences and insights in developing the requirements-driven architectural proposals that were previously discussed, and highlighting research topics and findings that support proposals for incremental or radical changes to the Internet routing and addressing paradigms. In other words, this second FIRA workshop 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 that aim at, among others:

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
Support for new or enhanced addressing schemes that may require enhanced or new forwarding behaviours
Support for multi-constraint and service- and/or compute-aware routing as well as forwarding behavior
Support for programmability of forwarding behavior as an alternative to SW virtualization of Layer 3 network functions
Energy efficiency considerations as a key performance indicator for new forwarding behavior
Time-variable routing and forwarding decisions in response to planned loss, or activation, of network connectivity based on scheduled events
Consideration for improving on user and system security (including privacy)
Using AI-based methods to learn best or better forwarding behaviours in advancement of a priori determined engineering solutions
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
Enabling zero-touch mechanisms, e.g., autonomous control plane approaches, for routing
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
Monetization of network resources, particularly in the light of delivering advanced applications to end users

The FIRA workshop solicits work on use cases, design principles, architectures, and techniques, but also solicits insights into implementations and experiments with novel solutions that address the highlighted objectives.

The workshop will start with a keynote address to scope the research agenda. This will lead to topical, cornerstone keynotes, followed by a session of paper presentations to provide updates on state-of-the-art research and allow questions and debate. Finally, the workshop will conclude by combining the topics into a panel session.

Topics of Interest

Advanced applications and use case analysis and requirements
Goals and challenges in future and evolving routing and addressing schemes
Architecture frameworks for multi-purpose routing
Limited domain architectures
Limited domain interconnection architectures
Routing on multiple optimality criteria
Compute-aware routing and forwarding
Low latency forwarding techniques
Time-variable routing and forwarding
Enhanced host protocol stacks for advanced routing and forwarding solutions
Routing on new forms of identification
Coordination of information and decisions across multiple domains (regions & technology layers)
Time-variant routing mechanisms and solutions
Routing based on formal routing algebras and regular expressions approaches
Routing for constrained and intermittently connected environments
Routing and forwarding based on AI-based methods, such as federated learning
Routing and forwarding based on zero-touch configuration
Centralized routing architectures
Integration with modern SDN architectures and protocols
Programmable forwarding architectures
Security analysis of semantic enhancements
Scalability analysis of novel routing mechanisms and 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, including all figures, tables, references, and appendices in two-column 10pt ACM format.

We also encourage research demos for which a two-page extended abstract must be submitted in the same format as the workshop papers.

Papers and extended abstracts 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://fira2023.hotcrp.com/.

If you have any questions or problems with your submission, please get in touch with Dr. Dirk Trossen (dirk.trossen@huawei.com).