S. Keshav
This article discusses my personal view of being Chair of SIGCOMM from 2013 to 2017.
Lessons from “A first-principles approach to understanding the Internet’s router-level topology”
David L. Alderson, John C. Doyle Caltech, Walter Willinger
Our main purpose for this editorial is to reiterate the main message that we tried to convey in our SIGCOMM’04 paper but that got largely lost in all the hype surrounding the use of scale-free net- work models throughout the sciences in the last two decades. That message was that because of (1) the Internet’s highly-engineered architecture, (2) a thorough understanding of its component tech- nologies, and (3) the availability of extensive (but typically noisy) measurements, this complex man-made system affords unique op- portunities to unambiguously resolve most claims about its prop- erties, structure, and functionality. In the process, we point out the fallacy of popular approaches that consider complex systems such as the Internet from the perspective of disorganized complexity and argue for renewed efforts and increased focus on advancing an “architecture first” view with its emphasis on studying the organized complexity of systems such as the Internet.
Five Decades of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM): A Bibliometric Perspective
Waleed Iqbal, Rana Tallal Javed, Junaid Qadir, Adnan Noor Mian, Gareth Tyson, Saeed-Ul Hassan, Jon Crowcroft
The ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIG- COMM) has been a major research forum for fifty years. This com- munity has had a major impact on the history of the Internet, and therefore we argue its exploration may reveal fundamental insights into the evolution of networking technologies around the globe. Hence, on the 50t h anniversary of SIGCOMM, we take this opportu- nity to reflect upon its progress and achievements, through the lens of its various publication outlets, e.g., the SIGCOMM conference, IMC, CoNEXT, HotNets. Our analysis takes several perspectives, looking at authors, countries, institutes and papers. We explore trends in co-authorship, country-based productivity, and knowl- edge flow to and from SIGCOMM venues using bibliometric tech- niques. We hope this study will serve as a valuable resource for the computer networking community.
Reflections on being CCR Editor 2008-2012
S. Keshav
This article discusses my personal view of being Editor of CCR from 2008 to 2012.
Perspective: White Space Networking with Wi-Fi like Connectivity
Ranveer Chandra and Thomas Moscibroda
This paper, titled White Space Networking with Wi-Fi like Connec- tivity [8], received the best paper award at ACM SIGCOMM 2009. Since then, it has led to new research, a new IEEE standard, new governmental regulations, and a new industry. The work also laid the foundation for new rural connectivity initiatives, connecting rural schools, hospitals, and libraries in Africa, Asia, and America.
Looking back at being the editor of CCR (2013-2016)
Dina Papagiannaki
Our community is celebrating 50 years and I was asked to provide my perspective on one of its longest standing communication vehi- cles, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, as one of its editors.
Perspective: Eliminating Channel Feedback in Next Generation Cellular Networks
Deepak Vasisht , Swarun Kumar , Hariharan Rahul , Dina Katabi
Deprecating The TCP Macroscopic Model
Matt Mathis, Jamshid Mahdavi
The TCP Macroscopic Model will be completely obsolete soon. It was a closed form performance model for Van Jacobson’s land- mark congestion control algorithms presented at Sigcomm’88. Ja- cobson88 requires relatively large buffers to function as intended, while Moore’s law is making them uneconomical. BBR-TCP is a break from the past, unconstrained by many of the assumptions and principles defined in Jacobson88. It already out performs Reno and CUBIC TCP over large portions of the Internet, generally without creating queues of the sort needed by earlier congestion control algorithms. It offers the potential to scale better while using less queue buffer space than existing algorithms. Because BBR-TCP is built on an entirely new set of principles, it has the potential to deprecate many things, including the Macro- scopic Model. New research will be required to lay a solid founda- tion for an Internet built on BBR.
Retrospective on “Towards an Active Network Architecture”
David Wetherall, David Tennenhouse
Network programmability has metamorphosed over the past twenty years from the controversial research vision of active networks, through PlanetLab, to the juggernaut of SDN and OpenFlow that has swept industry. Now PISA switches are emerging with support for protocol-independent reconfigurability. We reflect on how net- work architecture has evolved along a different path than we had foreseen to arrive at a place that is not so different than we and other researchers had hoped and imagined.
From Ethane to SDN and Beyond
Martín Casado, Nick McKeown, Scott Shenker
We briefly describe the history behind the Ethane paper and its ultimate evolution into SDN and beyond.