The Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) seeks papers on the topic of measurement-based research in data communications. The focus of IMC 2022 will be on research that improves the practice of network measurement, illuminates some facet of an operational network, or both. Please see the Call for Papers for a list of topics of particular relevance.
To submit a paper to the SIGCOMM 2022 conference, please read the rest of this document regarding paper formatting, registration, ethics, anonymity, and other important issues relevant to your submission.
Then use the paper submission site to:
- Register your abstract by May 11, 2022, 23:59 AoE.
- Submit your paper by May 18, 2022, 23:59 AoE.
These are hard deadlines and no extensions will be given.
Paper Formatting
All submissions must obey the following formatting requirements.
- Page limits
- Full papers: up to 13 pages for technical content + unlimited pages for references and appendix
- Short papers: up to 6 pages for technical content + unlimited pages for references and appendix
- Note that any paper with technical content greater than 6 pages in length will be reviewed as a full paper, even if it contains fewer than 13 pages.
- The paper body must include some statement about ethical considerations in an appendix section titled Ethics. This could simply contain the sentence “This work does not raise any ethical issues”, or where relevant (for example, but not exclusively, a paper involving human subjects), the discussion may be more detailed. See the Ethics section below for additional requirements for research that involves human subjects or other ethical concerns.
- Reviewers are not required to read any appendices or consider them in their review, with the exception of the mandatory Ethics appendix section. Authors should thus ensure that the core paper is complete and self-contained. For example, if the appendix provides details of a proof or experiment, the body should summarize the key result.
- Papers must be formatted for printing on Letter-sized (8.5” by 11”) paper. Paper text blocks must follow ACM guidelines: double-column, with each column 9.25” by 3.33”, 0.33” space between columns. Each column must use 10-point font or larger, and contain no more than 55 lines of text. Fonts used in other elements of the paper (e.g., figures) should be no smaller than 9 point.
- It is your responsibility to ensure that your submission satisfies the above requirements. If you are using LaTeX, you may make use of this template for ACM conference proceedings. With the older versions of this template you must add “10pt” to the documentclass command to meet the submission requirements. The current template sets 10pt by default. (Unlike the official template, it only includes an example for conference proceedings.)
Your goal as an author is to produce a clearly readable submission within the above constraints. Authors are strongly discouraged from violating the formatting requirements with the aim of including additional material: submissions that violate the formatting requirements may be desk rejected without review. You can visually inspect a page-by-page report of your paper format using the same tool as the submission system via a separate online form.
After the submission deadline, we will use the same tool to check the conformance of papers. The format checking tool uses heuristics and can make mistakes. The PC chairs will manually inspect and possibly reject those papers with evident format violations.
Please make sure that your submitted paper satisfies the following:
- You must list the submission number and the number of pages (ideally) in your paper in the author block, e.g., “Paper #N, 13 pages body, 15 pages total”, beneath your title. Registering your title, abstract, etc., will provide a paper submission number. Per the anonymity guidelines, you must remove any author names.
- You must provide an abstract, and it should be of no more than 200 words.
- You must number the pages.
- You must submit papers in PDF (Portable Document Format) and ensure that they are compatible with Adobe Acrobat (English version). Other formats, including Postscript, will not be accepted. Avoid using non-standard fonts. The PC must be able to display and print your submission exactly as we receive it using only standard tools and printers, so we strongly suggest that you use only standard fonts that are embedded in the PDF file.
- You should ensure that the paper prints well on black-and-white printers, not color printers. Pay particular attention to figures and graphs in the paper to ensure that they are legible without color. Explicitly using grayscale colors will provide best control over how graphs and figures will print on black-and-white printers.
- You should ensure that labels and symbols used in graphs and figures are legible, including the font sizes of tick marks, axis labels, legends, etc.
- You should limit the file size to less than 15 MB. Contact the PC chairs if you have a file larger than 15 MB.
Paper Metadata and Conflicts
As part of the paper registration, authors will be required to provide paper metadata which includes title and abstract, author names, affiliations, contact email addresses, topics matching the subject matter of the paper, track (main or operational systems), and conflicts with program committee (PC) members.
Broadly, we define conflict of interest with a PC member using the following principles:
- You are currently employed at the same institution, have been previously employed at the same institution within the last 12 months, or are going to begin employment at the same institution.
- You have a professional partnership as follows:
- Past or present association as thesis advisor or advisee.
- Collaboration on a project, publication, or grant proposal within the past 2 years (i.e., 2019 or later).
The PC chairs and members will review conflicts to ensure the integrity of the reviewing process, adding conflicts where necessary and sanity checking cases where conflicts do not appear justified. If there is no basis for PC conflicts provided by authors, those conflicts will be removed. Improperly identifying PC members as a conflict to avoid individual reviewers may lead to your paper being rejected. If you have concerns, please contact the PC chairs.
Paper Anonymity
IMC will use double blind submissions, per the following guidelines:
- Author names and affiliations must not appear on any submission.
- Identifying information such as grant numbers must not be included on submissions.
- The text of the submission must refer to the authors' own previous work in the third person.
For exceptions to the anonymization rules, see the detailed guidance on paper anonymity.
In addition to submitting an anonymized paper, double-blind reviewing requires that both authors and reviewers take care while reviewing is happening.
- Authors are welcome to release their paper in a non-peer-reviewed location (such as a technical report by your institution or arXiv), but you should not broadcast information about the publication widely. For example, do not post it to large mailing lists or social media forums where PC members would easily encounter it, and do not do general press releases. Authors are also welcome to talk about their work (as work-in-progress) at local institutions. In either case, authors should be aware of PC members who might encounter the work and avoid sharing the work in a way that a PC member would encounter it.
- PC members and other reviewers are expected to not actively attempt to deanonymize papers. In either case, if there is a breach of double-blind reviewing, the author and the reviewer should report it to the PC chairs.
Ethics Considerations
The program committee may raise concerns around the ethics of the work, even if it does not involve human subjects. All papers must include, in a clearly marked appendix section with the heading “Ethics”, a statement about ethical issues; papers that do not include such a statement may be rejected. This could be, if appropriate for the paper, simply the sentence “This work does not raise any ethical issues.” If the work involves human subjects or potentially sensitive data (e.g., user traffic or social network information, evaluation of censorship, etc.), the paper should clearly discuss these issues, perhaps in a separate subsection.
Research that entails experiments involving human subjects or user data (e.g., network traffic, passwords, social network information) should adhere to community norms. Any work that raises potential ethics considerations should indicate this on the submission form. The basic principles of ethical research are outlined in the Belmont Report: (1) respect for persons (which may involve obtaining consent); (2) beneficence (a careful consideration of risks and benefits); and (3) justice (ensuring that parts of the population that bear the risks of the research also are poised to obtain some benefit from it). Authors should further consult the ACM policy on research involving human subjects for further information on ethical principles that apply to this conference.
Research involving human subjects must be approved by the researchers’ respective Institutional Review Boards before the research takes place. Authors should indicate on the submission form whether the work involves human subjects. If so, the authors must indicate whether an IRB protocol has been approved for the research, or if the research has been determined exempt (either self-determination or IRB determination). We expect that any research follows the practices and procedures of the institution(s) where the work is being carried out; for example, some universities require separate approval for the use of campus data. We expect researchers to abide by these protocols.
We recognize that different IRBs follow different procedures for determining the status of human subject research, and approval or exempt status from a single institution may not align with community norms. To help the Ethics Committee review cases of concern, there is a need for more information about the research protocol. To this end, if the work involves human subjects, the authors must include with their submission a copy of the form that was used to determine IRB status (approved or exempt), sufficiently anonymized to preserve double-blind review.
If the submission describes research involving human subjects and none of the authors are at an institution with an IRB (or equivalent), the authors are nonetheless expected to follow a research protocol that adheres to ethical principles, as stated in the ACM policy on research involving human subjects. In such cases, the authors must use the Ethics section of their appendix to explain how their research protocol satisfies the principles of ethical research.
Some research does not involve human subjects yet nonetheless raises questions of ethics, which may be wide-ranging and not necessarily limited to direct effects. We encourage authors to be mindful of the ethics of the research that they undertake; these considerations are often not clear-cut, but often warrant thoughtful consideration. Discussions of these issues should be placed in the “Ethics” appendix section mentioned above, or in the main body of the paper where appropriate.
Paper Novelty
Under no circumstances, except where noted below, should authors submit previously-published work, submit the same work simultaneously to multiple venues, or submit papers that plagiarize the work of other authors. Like other conferences and journals, IMC prohibits these practices and may take action against authors who have engaged in them. In some cases, the program committee may share information about submitted papers with other conference chairs and journal editors to ensure the integrity of papers under consideration. If the PC discovers a violation of these principles, sanctions may include, but are not limited to, contacting the institutions of the authors and publicizing the details of the case.
The ACM policy on simultaneous submissions does not consider technical reports (including arXiv) to be concurrent publication or submission.
Paper Acceptance
The IMC 2022 PC will notify authors of acceptance/rejection decisions by August 19, 2022. All accepted papers will be shepherded by members of the PC. Authors of accepted papers should plan to interact with their shepherds immediately after notification, and to budget sufficient time between acceptance notification and the camera-ready deadline to coordinate with their shepherd. It is a requirement that the paper be considered acceptable to the assigned shepherd so that the updates to the paper reflect the issues raised by the PC (conflicts will be mediated by the PC chairs) before the paper is considered “accepted” to appear in the conference proceedings. In addition, the publisher of the IMC proceedings will review all accepted papers submitted for the camera-ready deadline. Authors should also budget sufficient time immediately after the camera-ready deadline to be available and responsive to any editing changes requested by the publisher.
After acceptance, substantive changes to paper titles require approval by the PC chairs. Only in exceptional circumstances should authors change their author list, and only with the approval of the PC chairs.
Authors of accepted papers will also need to sign an ACM copyright-release form. All rejected papers will be treated as permanently confidential.