Tag Archives: editorial

The July 2026 Issue

This July 2026 issue contains three technical papers.

The first paper, The Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol: An Algorithmic (and Lighthearted) Perspective by Matthias Bentert, Shay Kutten, Darya Melnyk, Tijana Milentijević,, and Stefan Schmid is an amusing read that investigates protocols and complexities of communication networks based on carrier pigeons. While lighthearted in nature, the paper is technically grounded in classic mathematical techniques used to analyze modern computer networks. This creative paper is both entertaining and informative—in fact, the paper proposes follow-up work that I’d love to see.

The second paper, A DualPI2 Module for Mahimahi: Behavioral Characterization and Cross-Platform Analysis by Nawel Alioua, Linghe Zhang, Aneesh Garg, Francis Y. Yan, and Elizabeth Belding describes the development of a modular implementation of the DualPI2 active queue management logic integrated into the Mahimahi network emulator. The authors use the DualPI2 module to analyze Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable Throughput (L4S) protocol and congestion control technologies, comparing the emulated results with real execution in the kernel. The artifacts should be useful to other researchers in the L4S space.

The third paper, From robots.txt to ai.txt: Mapping the Evolution of Web Permissions in the Age of AI by Felix Hoffmann, Tobias Goergens, Sonal Khosla, and Vaibhav Bajpai presents a measurement study that attempts to quantify the adoption of AI-oriented policy and descriptor files (e.g., (ai.txt, llms.txt, llms-full.txt) and analyze their use. The paper provides a useful analysis for understanding how website operators are responding to AI-driven crawling.

I hope that you will enjoy reading this new issue.

TelecomRAG: Taming Telecom Standards with Retrieval Augmented Generation and LLMs

Girma M. Yilma, Jose A. Ayala-Romero, Andres Garcia-Saavedra, Xavier Costa-Perez

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have immense potential to transform the telecommunications industry. They could help professionals understand complex standards, generate code, and accelerate development. However, traditional LLMs struggle with the precision and source verification essential for telecom work. To address this, specialized LLM-based solutions tailored to telecommunication standards are needed. This Editorial Note showcases how Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can offer a way to create precise, factual answers. In particular, we show how to build a Telecommunication Standards Assistant that provides accurate, detailed, and verifiable responses. We show a usage example of this framework using 3GPP Release 16 and Release 18 specification documents. We believe that the application of RAG can bring significant value to the telecommunications field.

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The July 2024 issue

This July 2024 issue contains one technical paper, one educational paper, and one editorial note.

The technical paper, A Survey on Packet Filtering, by Nick Sultana and colleagues, was originally submitted as an editorial. Given that CCR does not usually consider survey papers, it went through a thorough reviewing process. Given its value to the community, we felt that it deserves to be accepted as a technical paper, not an editorial. The topic of this work is important to the community, namely packet filtering. The authors present the results of a survey they ran to collect data from the networking community, including researchers and practitioners, about how packet filtering is used. They identify pain points related to packet filtering, and unmet needs of survey participants. Based on analysis of this survey data, they propose future research and development goals that would support the networking community.

The second paper, an educational contribution, Towards Immersive Cloud-Based IoT Education, by Fan Gabriella Xue and Matthew Caesar, presents ThingVisor, an IoT learning platform that enables hands-on IoT development in an immersive virtual space. Specifically, it allows users to design, test, and deploy IoT devices virtually in a simulated IoT world with static and dynamic software verification as a complementary tool to IoT education. The experiments confirm the learning effectiveness and user satisfaction of the platform, as well as the scalability and usability of the system.

Finally, the editorial note, TelecomRAG: Taming Telecom Standards with Retrieval Augmented Generation and LLMs by Girma M. Yilma and colleagues, discusses the very timely topic of Large Language Models (LLMs), and discuss the potential they have in transforming the telecommunications industry.

I hope that you will enjoy reading this new issue and welcome comments and suggestions on CCR Online (https://ccronline.sigcomm.org) or by email at ccr-editor at sigcomm.org.

Towards Re-Architecting Today’s Internet for Survivability: NSF Workshop Report

Fabián E. Bustamante, John Doyle, Walter Willinger, Marwan Fayed, David L. Alderson, Steven Low, Stefan Savage, Henning Schulzrinne

Abstract

On November 28–29, 2023, Northwestern University hosted a workshop titled “Towards Re-architecting Today’s Internet for Survivability” in Evanston, Illinois, US. The goal of the workshop was to bring together a group of national and international experts to sketch and start implementing a transformative research agenda for solving one of our community’s most challenging yet important tasks: the re-architecting of tomorrow’s Internet for “survivability”, ensuring that the network is able to fulfill its mission even in the presence of large-scale catastrophic events. This report provides a necessarily brief overview of two full days of active discussions.

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The April 2024 issue

This April 2024 issue contains two technical papers and one editorial note.

The first technical paper, This Is a Local Domain: On Amassing Country-Code Top-Level Domains from Public Data, by Raffaele Sommese and colleagues, presents a measurement study that investigates ccTLD coverage using public data sources. Domain lists such as Alexa and Tranco are crucial tools for performing representative Web censuses. However, these lists often overlook domains under country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs), resulting in biased census outcomes. The authors demonstrate that data from Certificate Transparency (CT) logs and Common Crawl provide robust ccTLD coverage and can serve as reliable proxies for Web censuses. The authors also plan to release ccTLD domain names to the community as part of an expansion of the daily OpenINTEL measurement.

The second technical paper, On Sample Selection for Continual Learning: a Video Streaming Case Study, by Alexander Dietmüller and colleagues, proposes Memento, a prototype implementation aiming at improving sample selection, especially in the tail of the traffic distribution. An already sizable and increasing body of work focuses on using ML models to capture the inherent complexity of communication networks. And yet, as network traffic evolves, ML approaches need to tackle the issue of concept drift, which implies that the model will eventually underperform. This means that ML models need retraining. When to retrain and on what data remain difficult problems. This paper focuses precisely on those open issues.

Finally, the editorial note, Towards Re-architecting Today’s Internet for Survivability — NSF Workshop Report by Fabian Bustamante and colleagues, reports on a workshop that took place on November 28-29, 2023, at Northwestern University. The goal of the workshop was to bring together a group of national and international experts to sketch and start implementing a transformative research agenda for solving one of our community’s most challenging yet important tasks: the re-architecting of tomorrow’s Internet for “survivability”, ensuring that the network is able to fulfill its mission even in the presence of large-scale catastrophic events.

I hope that you will enjoy reading this new issue and welcome comments and suggestions on CCR Online (https://ccronline.sigcomm.org) or by email at ccr-editor at sigcomm.org.

The January 2024 issue

This January 2024 issue contains two technical papers.

The first technical paper, Planter: Rapid Prototyping of In-Network Machine Learning Inference, by Changgang Zheng and colleagues, proposes a new framework to streamline the deployment of machine learning models across a wide range of hardware devices such as Intel Tofino, Xilinx/AMD Alveo and NVIDIA BlueField 2. The authors discuss the challenges of deploying machine learning algorithms into different programmable devices.

The second technical paper, iip: an integratable TCP/IP stack, by Kenichi Yasukata, presents an integratable TCP/IP stack, which aims to become a handy option for developers and researchers who wish to have a high-performance TCP/IP stack implementation for their projects. Existing performance-optimized TCP/IP stacks often incur tremendous integration complexity and existing portability-aware TCP/IP stacks have significant performance limitations. This paper introduces an API to allow for easy integration and good performance simultaneously.

I hope that you will enjoy reading this new issue and welcome comments and suggestions on CCR Online (https://ccronline.sigcomm.org) or by email at ccr-editor at sigcomm.org.

Can We Save the Public Internet?

Marjory Blumenthal, Ramesh Govindan, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Arvind Krishnamurthy, James McCauley, Nick Merrill, Tejas Narechania, Aurojit Panda, Scott Shenker

Abstract

The goal of this short document is to explain why recent developments in the Internet’s infrastructure are problematic. As context, we note that the Internet was originally designed to provide a simple universal service – global end-to-end packet delivery – on which a wide variety of end-user applications could be built. The early Internet supported this packet-delivery service via an interconnected collection of commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that we will refer to collectively as the “public Internet.” The Internet has fulfilled its packet-delivery mission far beyond all expectations and is now the dominant global communications infrastructure. By providing a level playing field on which new applications could be deployed, the Internet has enabled a degree of innovation that no one could have foreseen. To improve performance for some common applications, “enhancements” such as caching (as in content-delivery networks) have been gradually added to the Internet. The resulting performance improvements are so significant that such enhancements are now effectively necessary to meet current content delivery demands. Despite these tangible benefits, this document argues that the way these enhancements are currently deployed seriously undermines the sustainability of the public Internet and could lead to an Internet infrastructure that reaches fewer people and is largely concentrated among only a few large-scale providers. We wrote this document because we fear that these developments are now decidedly tipping the Internet’s playing field towards those who can deploy these enhancements at massive scale, which in turn will limit the degree to which the future Internet can support unfettered innovation. This document begins by explaining our concerns but goes on to articulate how this unfortunate fate can be avoided. To provide more depth for those who seek it, we provide a separate addendum with further detail.

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The I/O Driven Server: From SmartNICs to Data Movement Controllers

Justine Sherry

Abstract

Many researchers are turning to SmartNIC offloads to improve the performance of high-performance networked systems. In this editorial, I discuss why SmartNICs are an especially powerful form factor for improving I/O intensive applications, and how their position in the dataplane enables them to take on central role in managing I/O. Rather than focusing on the benefits of individual offloads, this paper aims to explore the position of SmartNICs in the overall system integration of datacenter servers at the hardware and software level. I argue that SmartNICs should be viewed as ‘data movement controllers’ (NIC-DMCs) which are responsible for tasks involved in moving data between network, CPU, accelerators, and other endpoints: multiplexing/steering, interfacing between protocols, and enforcing I/O policies. I then enumerate open questions in how the hardware and software systems of the future will evolve to accommodate a dedicated NIC-DMC which is independent of the CPU complex.

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On Integrating eBPF into Pluginized Protocols

Quentin De Coninck, Louis Navarre, Nicolas Rybowski

Abstract

eBPF is a popular technology originating from the Linux kernel that enables safely running user-provided programs in a kernel-context. This technology opened the door for efficient programming in the operating system, especially in its network stack. However, its applicability is not limited to the Linux kernel. Various efforts leveraged the eBPF Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) as the basis of other networking related use cases outside of the Linux kernel. This paper focuses on the pluginized protocols’ use case such as PQUIC and xBGP where the eBPF ISA serves as the basis to execute plugins providing per-session protocol behavior. It first quickly describes how the Linux kernel builds around this eBPF ISA to provide enhanced in-kernel network programmability. Then, the paper considers the case of pluginized protocols. Leveraging eBPF outside of the Linux kernel environment requires complementing the eBPF ISA to meet the pluginized protocols’ requirements. This paper details these integration efforts. Based on the lessons learned from these, it finally concludes by an applicability discussion of the eBPF ISA to other use cases.

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The October 2023 issue

This October 2023 issue contains three editorial notes.

The observing reader of CCR will have noticed that there is no July 2023 issue. There are three main factors at play here. Given the timing of our SIGCOMM conferences, summer is a low period for submissions to CCR. Then, as CCR is selective and its scope limited to timely works relevant to our community, few technical papers make it above our bar. Finally, I have witnessed a healthy shift away from technical papers towards more thought-provoking editorials over the last few years. We have enough conference and journals for technical papers to find an appropriate venue. On the other hand, our conferences and journals, due to their selective nature and the overly critical nature of the reviewing process, do not lend themselves to welcome thought-provoking and contentious contributions. Let CCR be their home.

The first editorial note, On Integrating eBPF into Pluginized Protocols, by Quentin De Coninck, Louis Navarre, and Nicolas Rybowski, considers the case of pluginized protocols, by leveraging eBPF outside of the Linux kernel environment. The second editorial note, The I/O Driven Server: From SmartNICs to Data Movement Controllers, by Justine Sherry, explores the position of SmartNICs in the overall system integration of datacenter servers at the hardware and software level. The third editorial note, Can We Save The Public Internet?, by Marjory Blumenthal, Ramesh Govindan, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Arvind Krishnamurthy, James McCauley, Nick Merrill, Tejas Narechania, Aurojit Panda, and Scott Shenker, explains why recent developments in the Internet’s infrastructure are problematic, and how we could prevent an evolution of the Internet that impedes on its original design principles and goals.

I hope that you will enjoy reading this new issue and welcome comments and suggestions on CCR Online (https://ccronline.sigcomm.org) or by email at ccr-editor at sigcomm.org.