John W. Byers, Michael Luby, Michael Mitzenmacher

Abstract

We introduced the concept of a digital fountain as a scalable approach to reliable multicast, realized with fast and practical erasure codes, in a paper published in ACM SIGCOMM ’98. This invited editorial, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the SIG, reflects on the trajectory of work leading up to our approach, and the numerous developments in the field in the subsequent 21 years. We discuss advances in rateless codes, efficient implementations, applications of digital fountains in distributed storage systems, and connections to invertible Bloom lookup tables.

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Jennifer Rexford

Abstract

Creating a better Internet—a global communications infras- tructure that is more secure, reliable, performant, flexible, and so on—is one of the grand challenges of our time. Yet, making substantive change to such a large, distributed, op- erational network is inherently difficult. This position paper argues that the networking research community should come together and adopt a sort of “ambitious pragmatism” that tackles the big problems while identifying the practical steps to take along the way. The community can work together to (i) identify and precisely formulate the main problems we need to address, (ii) more deeply understand a diverse array of practical constraints (including business drivers, economic incentives, government policies, and more), and (iii) create new deployment platforms and institutional structures to en- able good research ideas to “cross the chasm” to deployment.

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Nick McKeown, Guido Appenzeller, Isaac Keslassy

Abstract

The queueing delay faced by a packet is arguably the largest source of uncertainty during its journey. It therefore seems crucial that we understand how big the buffers should be in Internet routers. Our 2004 Sigcomm paper revisited the existing rule of thumb that a buffer should hold one bandwidth-delay product of packets. We claimed that for long-lived TCP flows, it could be reduced by N is the number of active flows, potentially reducing the required buffers by well over 90% in Internet backbone routers. One might reasonably expect that such a result, which supports cheaper routers with smaller buffers, would be embraced by the ISP community. In this paper we revisit the result 15 years later, and explain where it has succeeded and failed to affect how buffers are sized.

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S. Keshav

Abstract

This article discusses the events that led to the publication of my paper ’A Control-Theoretic Approach to Flow Control’ that won the Best Student Paper Award in 1991 and a Test-of-Time Award in 2007.

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Muriel Médard, Sachin Katti, Dina Katabi, Wenjun Hu, Hariharan Rahul, Jon Crowcroft

Abstract

While placing the paper “XORs in the Air” in the context of the theoretical and practical understanding of network coding, we present a view of the progress of the field of network coding, In particular, we examine the interplay of theory and practice in the field.

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Frances Corry, Anna C. Loup

Abstract

This editorial gives a brief overview of a project historicizing the “Technical History of the Internet,” a tutorial held at SIGCOMM’s 1999 meeting at Harvard University. Organized in part by the late computer scientist and historian Chris Edmondson-Yurkanan, the tutorial brought together 19 key players from the development of the Internet to reflect on their foundational work. Using both digi- tal and physical records from Edmondson-Yurkanan’s archive, we discuss the importance of this event in generating a robust discus- sion and historical record about the Internet’s technical evolution. Historical work about this tutorial also raises important questions on the ways in which records about the Internet’s development are preserved or neglected.

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Walter Willinger, Murad S. Taqqu, Daniel V. Wilson

Abstract

This editorial is an outgrowth of our research efforts that resulted in the SIGCOMM’93 paper [1] entitled On the self-similar nature of Ethernet traffic. We discuss some lessons we have learned as we have watched the published findings being absorbed by the scientific community in general and the networking community in particular. We focus on aspects that have remained relevant today, especially at a time when, with the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, networking research has become increasingly data-dependent and data-driven.

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Ryan Beckett, Ratul Mahajan, Todd Millstein, Jitendra Padhye, David Walker

Abstract

We reflect on the historical context that lead to Propane, a high-level language and compiler to help network operators bridge the gap be- tween network-wide routing objectives and low-level configurations of devices that run complex, distributed protocols. We also high- light the primary contributions that Propane made to the networking literature and describe ongoing challenges. We conclude with an important lesson learned from the experience.

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Albert Greenberg, Geoffrey Xie, David A. Maltz, Jibin Zhan, Jennifer Rexford, Hui Zhang

Abstract

It’s been 15 years since what we now call Software Defined Network began emerging out of a set of ideas in the networking research com- munity. This editorial note traces how the ideas in one particular paper from that time have evolved and found practical applications.

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Lyman Chapin

Abstract

In the policy realm what we call “Internet issues” are not actually “Internet” issues-they are well-pedigreed social, political, cultural, and economic issues, for which we clever technologists have pro- vided a rich new environment in which to grow and multiply. It follows that the people best prepared to tackle “Internet” issues may be thoughtful professionals in fields such as behavioral psychology, linguistics, sociology, education, history, ethnology, and political science-not (exclusively) “Internet experts”.

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