Call For Papers, ACM IMC 2025

The Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) is a highly selective venue for the presentation of measurement-based research in data communications. As we are in the era of data-driven research, IMC 2025 will focus on advancing the state of the art in the collection, usage, analysis, and sharing of network measurements for the research community. Despite the efforts in stimulating reproducibility of research as well as sharing of data, little progress has been made in our community to make research data open. Therefore, our attention when assessing contributions will be particularly on the willingness of the authors to share their data and make their work reproducible.

To encourage data sharing and reproducibility, authors will be required to make a declaration on artifact availability (full, partial, or no availability) for the submitted work. Since legitimate reasons (such as proprietary and privacy reasons) may prevent authors from sharing artifacts, papers will be assessed based on whether the contributions warrant acceptance despite the lack of artifact availability. In the case of no availability of artifacts, the authors are expected to explain why this is the case in a specific section. Artifact submission is not required at the paper submission time. All papers accepted to the program will be shepherded to ensure that the artifacts promised have been made available.

IMC takes a broad view of contributions that are considered in scope for improving the practice of network measurement, including, but not limited to:

• collection and analysis of data that yield new insights about network structure and network performance (e.g., traffic, topology, routing, energy utilization, performance)
• collection and analysis of data that yield new insights about application and end-user behavior (e.g., economics, privacy, security, application interaction with protocols)
• measurement-based modeling (e.g., workloads, scaling behavior, assessment of performance bottlenecks, causality)
• methods and tools to monitor and visualize network-based phenomena
• systems and algorithms that build on measurement-based findings
• theoretical analysis and modeling of networked-systems and measurement techniques
• novel methods for data collection, analysis, and storage (e.g., anonymization, querying, sharing)
• reappraisal of previous empirical network measurements and measurement-based conclusions
• descriptions of challenges and future directions the measurement community should pursue

Networks of interest include:

• Internet transit networks
• edge networks, including home networks, broadband access networks (e.g., cable, fiber), and cellular networks
• data center networks and cloud computing infrastructure
• peer-to-peer, overlay, and content distribution networks
• software-defined networks
• online social networks
• online services, platforms, and content providers
• experimental networks, prototype networks, and future internetworks

Replicability Track:

IMC 2025 will continue the Replicability Track for submissions that aim to reproduce or replicate results that have been previously published at IMC. Priority will be given to replicability studies, although reproducibility studies are also in scope. For the definitions, please see ACM’s site.

Submissions to this track are two-phase. Prospective authors are invited to submit an Expression of Interest (EoI) via the submission system in the form of an abstract which must explain:

• Which paper the authors aim to replicate
• Whether the paper will be replicated or reproduced
• What the IMC community stands to learn from the replication or reproduction
• Chosen approach, and why it will lead to new insights

A small committee will evaluate the EoIs and their potential to be of interest to the IMC community. The authors of strong abstracts will receive an invitation to a full submission.

The EoI serves to avoid misunderstandings and disappointment for authors as we acknowledge that replicating or reproducing a paper is a very significant effort to which potential authors would commit much time.

Full submissions will then be assessed by the TPC and must conform to the same criteria and rules as full submissions on the main track (see below).

All papers accepted as part of the reproducibility track will be included in the conference proceedings with the title indicating the track. The accepted papers will also have an opportunity to be presented during the poster session and an invited subset will have an opportunity to be presented as in-person talks.

See the Important Dates section for the EoI deadline. Full submissions have the same deadlines (abstract registration and full submission) as the IMC Cycle 2 deadline. There won’t be a replicability track submission deadline in Cycle 1 (November 2024).

Review process and criteria

IMC 2025 invites two forms of submissions:

• Full papers (up to 13 pages for text and figures + unlimited pages for references and appendix) that describe original research, with succinctness appropriate to the topics and themes they discuss.
• Short papers (up to 6 pages for text and figures + unlimited pages for references and appendix) that convey work that is less mature but shows exciting promise, OR offer results that do not merit a full submission. Short papers could articulate a high-level vision and describe challenging future directions that the authors believe the community should tackle; validate, verify, or update important results; or present new ideas that challenge existing assumptions. These reviewers will be reminded of the specific expectations for short papers.

Any submission exceeding the short paper page-length limit will be evaluated as a full paper.

Authors should submit only original work that has not been published before and is not under submission to any other venue. We will consider full paper submissions that extend previously published short, preliminary papers (including IMC short papers), in accordance with the SIGCOMM policy and the ACM Plagiarism Policy. The ACM policy on simultaneous submissions does not consider technical reports (including arXiv) to be concurrent publication or submission. This year we will also ask authors to declare if a previous version of their paper was submitted at past editions of IMC or to any other ACM conference.

The review process will have several reviewing rounds. To allow authors time to improve their work and submit to other venues, authors of submissions for which there is a consensus on rejection will be notified early.

This is the first edition of IMC with two deadlines per year (Nov 21st, 2024 and May 15th, 2025) and an optional one-shot-revision process across deadlines. The key goal of these novelties is (i) to further enhance the quality and timeliness of the papers we publish; (ii) provide more flexibility in submission timing, with guaranteed timeliness of reviews; (iii) allowing exciting but not-yet-ready papers to receive a one-shot-revision decision in lieu of rejection (allowed only for one round); and allow researchers to spread out their submissions across the year and submit high quality work. We will test and tune this process this year and revisit based on the data and feedback collected.

[Please read carefully] These novelties will affect decisions and submissions in the following way:

● Accept: Accepted papers from both deadlines will be presented at the IMC conference and appear as part of the proceedings. Accepted papers submitted to the November deadline will appear as accepted on the IMC website and the authors will be permitted to talk about these upcoming publications, for example listing them on their CVs.

● One-Shot-Revision: Papers marked with this outcome will be given specific action points and can be resubmitted during the next deadline. At that point, the same reviewers will judge them. This judgment will be made on the basis of whether the authors have satisfied the requests accompanying the revision decision. Unlike in the shepherding process, the requested action points may include running additional experiments that obtain specific results, e.g., comparing performance against a certain alternative and beating it by at least 10%. During this revision period, the paper is still considered under review to IMC and therefore cannot be submitted to other conferences unless the authors first withdraw it from consideration. The one-shot revisions can be submitted to the next immediate deadline (e.g., Nov -> May). In addition, only for revised submissions sent to the “May” deadline, we will actually set their submission deadline approximately 1 month later (e.g., June 20th, 2025). [The rationale is to give authors approximately 3 months to work on their revision, but the notification of papers submitted in November is less than 2 months apart from the May submission deadline.]
To avoid overwhelming the review process, the criteria for selecting the one-shot-revision option have been codified in a document that we submitted for comment to the community in early 2024 and program chairs will coordinate with TPC members to make sure a balance is reached. E.g., one-shot-revision papers must have at least one champion among reviewers, advocating for the relevance and timeliness of the work; only up to 3 additions/changes to the paper can be asked; and the TPC must agree that if those 3 conditions are satisfied then there is no doubt that the paper deserves to be accepted.

● Reject: Rejected papers cannot be resubmitted at the next deadline. I.e., approximately 12 months must pass since the last IMC deadline they were submitted to. Note: papers rejected at IMC 2024 cannot be submitted to the November 2024 deadline. This includes rejected short papers that authors intend to extend to the long format for a new submission. They can be submitted in May 2025.

IMC 2025 will bestow three awards on paper submissions, (1) a Best Paper award; (2) a Best Student Paper award; and (3) a Community Contribution award. All accepted papers are eligible for the best paper award; the best student paper award is limited to papers whose main author is a student at the time of submission. The community contribution award will recognize a paper with an outstanding contribution to the community in the form of a new dataset, source code distribution, open platform, or other noteworthy service to the community. To be eligible for the community award, the authors must make data or source code publicly available or have a software artifact that is accessible and usable by the public at the time of the camera-ready deadline. The authors indicate their eligibility on the submission form and are also encouraged to include a link to the contribution in the submitted paper.

A few accepted papers may be forwarded for fast-track submission to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

Detailed submission instructions

For all information about paper submission—including anonymity, ethics, use of generative AI, and paper formatting—please see the Detailed Submission Instructions page.

Dates

Cycle 1 Deadline

Cycle 2 Deadline

Diversity and Inclusiveness

As part of our efforts at fostering diversity and inclusiveness, we provide the following guidelines to assist you when preparing your paper submission and/or your conference presentation.

Inclusivity Guidelines: Good technical writing often requires pedagogical examples to explain complex ideas. These provide an opportunity to promote inclusiveness by challenging implicit biases and assumptions.

• Avoid gender-specific pronouns if possible. Where required, consider interspersing a balance of male (“he”, “his”), female (“she”, “her”), and gender-neutral (“they”, “their”) ones.
• Use gender-neutral names in examples. Instead of Alice and Bob, try Alex and Jun. Consider names that reflect a variety of cultural backgrounds: Esteban, Naveena, Sasha, Sergey, Tuan, Xin, and so on.
• Refrain from assuming binary gender. For instance, the “gender” column in a table of data should have more than just “male” and “female” values.
• Be mindful of people’s diverse backgrounds. Not everyone has two parents. Not every marriage involves “husband” and “wife”. Not everyone lives in a house, or has a car.

Accessibility Guidelines: Color and hearing perception varies from person to person depending on age, color blindness, distance, visual acuity, etc. Make sure that the contents of your paper are accessible to all, by considering the following:

• Use patterns, symbols, and textures to emphasize and contrast visual elements in graphs and figures, rather than using colors alone. Graphs should be readable either in monochrome or color versions.
• Use a color palette that is designed for visually-impaired or color-blind people. Avoid poor color combinations such as green/red or blue/purple.

Submission Site

Please submit your paper for the Cycle 1 (November 2024) deadline at https://imc2025.hotcrp.com.