SIGCOMM '26 Call For Papers

The ACM SIGCOMM 2026 conference seeks papers describing significant research contributions or significant deployment experiences in communication networks and networked systems. SIGCOMM takes a broad view of networking which includes (but is not limited to):

• All types of computer networks, including mobile, wide-area, data center, embedded, home, and enterprise networks.
• All types of wired and wireless technologies, including optics, radio, acoustic, and visible light-based communication.
• All aspects of networks and networked systems, such as network architecture, packet-switched and circuit-switched hardware and software, virtualization, mobility, resource management, performance, energy consumption and environmental impact, topology, robustness, security, diagnosis, verification, privacy, economics, evolution, and interactions with applications.
• All parts of the network life cycle, including planning, designing, building, operating, troubleshooting, migrations, and end-of-life.
• All approaches and techniques applied to networking, including theory, analysis, experimentation, and AI/machine learning.

SIGCOMM 2026 will accept submissions in two tracks: research and experience.

Research track submissions should significantly advance the state of the art in networking by, for instance, proposing and developing novel ideas or by rigorously evaluating or re-evaluating existing ideas.

Experience track submissions will present key insights found in the course of executing deployments of networking techniques, especially in settings that most in the community cannot duplicate (for instance, for reasons of scale). Please note there are significant changes to the experience track which are described below in the "new this year" section.

Survey and tutorial papers are out of scope.

All submissions must be anonymous, i.e., not reveal author names. Experience submissions, however, may reveal the name of the deploying organization or the deployed system. All authors must be listed in HotCRP before the submission deadline so that reviewer conflicts are handled properly.

At paper registration time, authors must explicitly choose in the submission form whether their paper is to be considered for the research or experience track. Each submission will only be considered for the one track identified at submission time.

Submissions

Submissions should be in two-column, 10-point format, and can be up to 12 pages in length with as many additional pages as necessary for references and optional appendices.

Submissions and final papers may include appendices (following references, not counting against the 12 pages). Reviewers are not required to read appendices or consider them in their review. 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. Appendices may also include non-traditional material, such as videos, datasets, and code, all appropriately anonymized.

Please see the Submission Instructions for details on paper formatting, registration, anonymity, and other important issues relevant to your submission.

Accepted papers may be shepherded by a member of the program committee to ensure reviewer feedback is appropriately addressed. The shepherd will also review appendices and must approve their necessity.

SIGCOMM 2026 plans to be an in-person event, and at least one author of every accepted paper is expected to arrange for an in-person attendee to present the paper and answer questions.

For accepted papers, the official publication date is the earlier among (1) the first day of the SIGCOMM conference or (2) the day that the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library or posted online at SIGCOMM.org. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference and may affect the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Submission site: https://sigcomm26.hotcrp.com

One-shot Revision

A small number of submissions may be invited to a one-shot revision. Such a revision decision includes a summary of the paper's merits and a list of necessary changes that are required for the paper to be accepted at SIGCOMM. The authors will be invited to resubmit a revised manuscript (approximately 1 month after the revision request is issued) that addresses the referees' comments. This process will be managed by a shepherd selected by the PC.

Upon resubmission, authors are encouraged to provide a point-by-point rebuttal to the points raised by the referees, a version of the manuscript in which changes are suitably marked, and a list of changes made to the manuscript. In the rebuttal to the referees, authors should be succinct, yet thorough. The revised paper will be reviewed to judge whether it addresses all of the requested revision requirements. This review will be conducted, to the extent possible, by the same reviewers as earlier. To enable this, PC members who give one-shot-revision decisions are obligated to participate in the revision process. Revised papers can only receive a decision of accept or reject; this is what makes the revisions "one-shot."

A one-shot revision decision is not a guarantee for eventual acceptance. While revised papers that satisfy the revision instructions are expected to be accepted, they can be rejected if the revision instructions have not been fully addressed or if the revised version unveils new significant concerns that were not discovered during the earlier reviews.

During the revision period, the paper is still considered under review to SIGCOMM and therefore cannot be submitted to other conferences unless the authors first withdraw it from consideration.

New in SIGCOMM 2026

(new/updated) Experience Track Papers

This year will feature two key changes in the experience track in terms of requirements for the papers and how the papers will be included in the program. Experience track papers now include two required sections in the main body:

• Requirements: A key goal of experience track papers is to expose the community with challenges faced in operational deployments. Examples of these operational deployments might include, but are not limited to, overviews of large-scale deployed systems, targeted, but impactful, interventions on widely-deployed systems software, or medium-scale campus-wide deployed systems. To make sure this goal is achieved, each experience paper must include two new sections:
  • Deployment section: within the main body of the paper where the authors explicitly describe the deployment. The goal of this section is to help reviewers understand the scale of the deployment and for how long the deployment has been in place. To this end, this text should explicitly provide information about the size (e.g., number of users or percentage of user-base), scale (e.g., number of nodes), and the duration of the deployment
  • Lessons-learned section: also within the main body of the paper where the authors explicitly describe the connection between the lessons learned in deployment and the assumptions made earlier in the research process. In particular, authors should tie their experience to previously published papers whenever possible.
• Representation in the program
  • Explicit identification: This year we will explicitly identify experience track papers. We find that such a differentiation will both mirror other communities' approach to experience track papers, e.g., Database and Architecture, and better allow our growing community to identify them.
  • Separate sessions: We will also separate experience and research track papers into different sessions to further help with explicit identification and delineation of research from experience-based contributions.

(new/updated) Rebuttals

Authors of papers that made it through to the discussion phase will be given a chance to respond to reviewer comments via a rebuttal system. These may include providing additional analysis, experimental results, or performance comparisons that substantiate the claims of the paper or rebuttal response.

(new/updated) Submission Limits per Author

This year we will limit each author to at most eight submissions across tracks. If an author is listed on more than eight submissions to the conference, the program co-chairs will desk-reject surplus submissions. Additionally, we will apply this policy when accounting for authors changes to accepted papers.

(new/updated) Summary of Changes (since previous rejection)

For previously rejected papers, authors will have the option (not the mandate) to provide information regarding the previous submission(s) and a summary of the subsequent revisions to the paper. This description (max. 1 page), which will be supplied to reviewers after they have completed their reviews, helps reviewers who may have reviewed a previous draft of the work to appreciate any improvements to the currently submitted work. All information should be properly anonymized and should be uploaded via the submission form.

(new/updated) Early Rejection

In order 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 earlier than the formal notification date.

Ethics and Policy

All papers must include, in the main body of the paper, a statement or subsection about ethical issues raised by the work. In limited cases this could simply be a sentence disclaiming ethical issues, but work involving human subjects or potentially sensitive data (e.g., user traffic, social network information, censorship evasion) must clearly discuss the relevant issues. Papers that do not include an ethics statement will be desk rejected.

Papers must follow basic precepts of ethical research and subscribe to community norms. Misrepresentation, plagiarism, and coercion and abuse related to authorship or review are unacceptable at SIGCOMM. Works must also show respect for norms around privacy, secure storage of sensitive data, voluntary and informed consent for human subjects and users who might be placed at risk, avoiding deceptive practices when not essential, beneficence (maximizing benefits while minimizing potential harm), and risk mitigation. Authors may want to consult the Menlo Report and the ACM ethics policy for further information on ethical principles, and they may find the Allman/Paxson paper in IMC 2007 helpful for a perspective on ethical data sharing.

Authors should also consult ACM Publications Policies and the ACM Policy on Authorship, especially those around Authors; Plagiarism, Misrepresentation, and Falsification; Research Involving Human Subjects; Prior Publication and Simultaneous Submissions; Coercion and Abuse; and the use of Generative AI in papers.

In particular, please carefully review the following statements:

1. "By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM's new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy."
2. "Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and has made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts."

Please note that this year we will require authors to include their ORCID at submission time. If you are unable to generate an ORCID or wish to submit your paper anonymously, please contact the chairs.

Many organizations have an ethics review process, sometimes called an Institutional Review Board (IRB), and in many projects, IRB involvement is appropriate. IRB approval of research is an important factor and should be mentioned, but the program committee will independently evaluate the ethical soundness of the work just as they evaluate its technical soundness.

The Program Committee takes a broad view of what constitutes an ethical concern, and the PC chairs may reach out to authors during the review process if questions arise.

Use of Generative AI

Authors should make sure to consult the ACM Policy on Authorship when it comes to the use of GenAI. In particular:

"Generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT, may not be listed as authors of an ACM published Work. The use of generative AI tools and technologies to create content is permitted but must be fully disclosed in the Work. For example, the authors could include the following statement in the Acknowledgements section of the Work: ChatGPT was utilized to generate sections of this Work, including text, tables, graphs, code, data, citations, etc. If you are uncertain about the need to disclose the use of a particular tool, err on the side of caution, and include a disclosure in the acknowledgements section of the Work."

Important: In light of recent events at other ACM conferences, this year we will be validating references to ensure that papers do not contain hallucinated references. To do this, we will require authors to submit their .bbl file in the submission form.

Artifact Evaluation for Accepted Papers

The authors of accepted SIGCOMM 2026 papers will be invited to submit supporting materials to the Artifact Evaluation process. Artifact Evaluation is run by a separate committee that will assess how well the submitted artifacts support the work described in the accepted papers. Participation in Artifact Evaluation is voluntary and has no influence on paper acceptance, but it is strongly encouraged. Papers that go through the Artifact Evaluation process successfully will receive badges printed on the papers themselves. Additional details on the Artifact Evaluation process can be found on the SIGCOMM 2026 website.

Non-paper Sessions

We are continuing the tradition of non-paper sessions created in 2024. Non-paper sessions bring together a group of speakers to present on topics relevant to the SIGCOMM community that are not research or experience papers. Topics may include (but are not limited to) discussions of the research process, networking education and teaching, mentorship, history of networking, or outreach to members of the broader networking community not normally included within the SIGCOMM conference. Non-paper sessions will be selected from submissions of short proposals. Further details and CFP will be posted later.

Important Dates