Call for Papers

The 25th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets 2026) will bring together researchers to explore the future of computer networking and networked systems. HotNets has long served as a venue for ambitious new ideas that challenge assumptions and shape the direction of the field. Continuing this tradition, HotNets 2026 will provide a forum for both emerging technical directions and broader discussions about how networking research, and the networking community itself, should evolve.

We invite researchers to submit papers presenting ambitious early-stage technical ideas with the potential to influence the future of networking research. We seek new systems, architectures, protocols, measurements, and applications, as well as novel ways of thinking about the design, operation, and evolution of networked systems.

We seek exciting new ideas over incremental, well-baked systems. An ideal submission has the potential to open a line of inquiry for the community that results in multiple conference papers in related venues rather than a single follow-on conference paper. We strongly discourage "conference papers in miniature." The program committee will explicitly favor papers that challenge assumptions, stimulate reflection and discussion, and have the potential to shape future research directions over incremental work that is already ready for conference publication.

Strong submissions should clearly articulate how their contribution differs from, challenges, or extends existing lines of work. Authors should explain what assumptions, abstractions, or research questions their work reconsiders, and why doing so opens new opportunities for networking research. We particularly encourage papers that reframe familiar problems, identify overlooked questions, or propose new ways of thinking about the design, evaluation, and evolution of networked systems.

Papers will be evaluated based on the novelty and significance of the technical contribution, the soundness of the methodology or reasoning, and their potential to influence future systems and research directions. We explicitly encourage bold ideas that may not yet be fully validated, provided they are technically sound and intellectually substantive. Full implementations and exhaustive evaluations are not required, although submissions should provide sufficient grounding to enable meaningful engagement and assessment by the community.

The program committee will conduct a first review round focused on assessing the paper’s central contribution, intellectual ambition, and potential to influence future research directions or stimulate meaningful discussion within the HotNets community. This round will be based primarily on the paper’s abstract and introduction. Authors should therefore ensure that these sections clearly and compellingly convey the paper’s contribution, significance, and relevance to the HotNets audience.

HotNets takes a broad view of networking research. The scope includes (but is not limited to) new ideas that relate to mobile, wide-area, data-center, home, and enterprise networks and that use a variety of link technologies (e.g. wired, wireless, optical, visual, and acoustic), as well as social networks and network architecture. HotNets encompasses all aspects of networks, which include (but are not limited to) packet-processing and transmission hardware and software, virtualization, mobility, provisioning and resource management, performance, energy consumption, sustainability, topology, robustness, measurement, diagnosis, verification, privacy, security, economics and evolution, theory, usability, machine learning, and interactions with applications.

Accepted papers will appear in the ACM Digital Library.

New This Year: Broadening the HotNets Conversation with Perspective Papers

HotNets has long served as a venue for identifying and debating the next important questions in networking. HotNets 2026 continues this tradition. At the same time, some of the most consequential questions facing the field concern not only new technical mechanisms, systems, and findings, but also how networking research is conducted, evaluated, and communicated, and how it evolves. To better support these conversations, HotNets 2026 explicitly broadens the scope of the workshop to welcome substantive perspective and community-facing contributions.

To this end, HotNets 2026 will accept two categories of submissions:

• Technical papers (as discussed above): papers whose primary contribution is a new technical idea, system, analysis, methodology, empirical finding, or other concrete research result.
• Perspective papers: papers whose primary contribution is a new way of understanding, critiquing, synthesizing, or prioritizing important technical or community-facing questions. Such papers may address technical research directions and systems, research methodologies, publication and reviewing practices, education, or broader questions about the evolution of the networking community.

Authors will be required to indicate in HotCRP which category their submission belongs to.

Papers in the latter category may focus directly on technical research topics, for example by identifying fundamental open questions, advocating for new approaches, offering constructive critiques of the state of networking research, re-framing or debunking existing work (as in this paper), or proposing new evaluation methods. Alternatively, they may focus on community-facing topics, such as networking research methodologies (see here for an example), evaluation practices, or discussing questions pertaining to how the networking community itself should evolve, such as the role generative AI should play in networking research, reviewing, and education; the incentives and publication structures shaping the field; and emerging research agendas and directions.

Regardless of topic, perspective papers should be exploratory, intellectually ambitious, and capable of opening new lines of inquiry, challenging existing assumptions, or productively reshaping how the community approaches important technical and research questions.

Perspective papers will be evaluated based on the originality and intellectual substance of the perspective, the strength and grounding of the argument, and the potential to productively influence how the community understands or approaches important technical and research questions. Strong submissions should articulate a clear and debatable thesis and provide concrete insights, critiques, syntheses, or recommendations grounded in relevant technical or community context.

Workshop Format and Participation

HotNets attendance is limited to keep the workshop intimate and to facilitate lively discussion (with the possibility of additional virtual participants). Participation is by invitation only, although a limited number of open registration slots for in-person attendance will be made available to the broader community.

To promote engagement and discussion, one author of each accepted paper is required to participate in person. Authors with concerns about in-person participation are encouraged to contact the PC chairs.

All accepted papers will serve as central components of the workshop program. To better support the kind of engagement and discussion that HotNets aims to foster, HotNets 2026 will emphasize interaction, discussion, and cross-paper engagement through a mix of presentation and discussion formats, rather than relying primarily on a sequence of short paper presentations. These formats will include paper-focused interactive sessions and curated discussions organized around broader themes and emerging directions.

Submission and Formatting

Papers should be formatted according to the two-column ACM proceedings format. Each paper should have no more than 6 pages, excluding references, in 10 point font. There is no limit on the page count for references, however appendices are not allowed. Papers must contain novel ideas and must differ significantly in content from previously published papers.

All submissions must be blind: they must not indicate the names or affiliations of the authors in the paper. Only electronic submissions in PDF will be accepted. Submissions must be written in English, render without error using standard tools (e.g., Acrobat Reader), and print on US Letter paper. Each reference must list all authors of the paper (i.e., do not use "et al."). The citations should be in numeric style, e.g., [52]. Please make sure that figures and tables are legible, even after the paper is printed in gray-scale. Papers that exceed the length requirement or deviate from the expected format will be rejected. This archive contains a LaTeX class file that follows the prescribed submission format and has the correct defaults for HotNets 2026 submissions. Specifically, the first two lines should be:

        \documentclass[sigconf, 10pt, anonymous, nonacm]{acmart}
        \settopmatter{printfolios=true, printccs=false, printacmref=false}
        

The template uses these margins and they will be checked in the HotCRP format checker. Please ensure that the correct template is being used and that the margins are properly set.

                    top=57pt (0.792 inches)
                    bottom=73pt (1.014 inches)
                    inner=54pt (0.75 inches)
                    outer=54pt (0.75 inches)
                    

The default citation style is numeric. Please do not modify the acmart.cls file or settings to try to sneak in additional space.

Papers will be submitted on the HotCRP. A link will be made available soon.

Policy on Concurrent Submissions

Concurrent submissions to HotNets 2026 and any other peer-reviewed venue that cover the same work (differences in the degree of detail given the two venues' length limits notwithstanding) are prohibited, and will result in the immediate rejection of the HotNets submission in question. "Concurrent" means any other peer-reviewed venue whose reviewing period (i.e., between submission and notification) overlaps with that of HotNets. The "same work" means, for example, a submission overlapping significantly in content with a conference submission. However, a position paper submitted to HotNets (e.g., that reflects broadly on the state of some aspect of the field, adopts a position as to how the field should move forward, or articulates a broad avenue of future work) will not be considered the "same work" as a conference-length paper on a specific system that addresses a point under the broad umbrella covered by the position paper. Authors with questions about this policy should contact the PC co-chairs before submitting.

Ethical Concerns

As part of the submission process, authors must attest that their work complies with all applicable ethical standards of their home institution(s), including, but not limited to, privacy policies and policies on experiments involving humans. Note that submitting research for approval by one's institution's ethics review body is necessary, but not sufficient – in cases where the PC has concerns about the ethics of the work in a submission, the PC will have its own discussion of the ethics of that work. The PC takes a broad view of what constitutes an ethical concern, and authors agree to be available at any time during the review process to rapidly respond to queries from the PC chairs regarding ethical standards.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline:	July 16th, 2026 (23:59 AoE)
Author notification:	Sep 24th, 2026