Call For Papers

SPECIAL ISSUE OF COMPUTER NETWORKS

HOT TOPICS in TRANSPORT PROTOCOLS FOR VERY FAST AND VERY LONG DISTANCE NETWORKS

Introduction

Fast long-distance networks (i.e., networks operating at 1Gbit/s, 2.5 Gbit/s, or 10 Gbit/s and spanning several countries or states) are now becoming commonplace. More and more researchers now routinely transfer between 10 GB and multi-TB datasets over gigabit networks. Application domains for such massive transfers include data-intensive Grids (e.g., in Particle Physics, Earth Observation, Bio informatics, and Radio Astronomy), database mirroring for Web sites (e.g., in e-commerce), and push-based Web cache updates.
          Although the network infrastructure is now in place, or will soon be, the transport and application protocols available to date perform rather poorly over such networks. Standard TCP (TCP Reno) is a reliable transport protocol that is designed to perform well in traditional networks. However, several experiments and analyses have shown that this protocol is not suitable for each and every kind of application and environment – e.g., bulk data transfer in high bandwidth, large round trip time networks. Current versions of TCP, for instance, recover very slowly from packet loss when the RTT and the link capacity are large.

A number of research teams have begun investigating these issues and a set of new protocols have been proposed and are studied. The International Workshops serie on Protocols for very Fast Long-Distance Networks (pfldnet) are very successful in bringing together many researchers from the U.S., Asia and Europe who are working on these problems. Since the three last years,  considerable progress  has been  made within  this  field.  To  capture the  essence  of  the most  challenging problems  in  a  timely  manner  a  special issue  in  protocols for very long distance and high capacity networks is proposed.

Original  papers  are  solicited  on  topics  relevant  to  the most recent issues the community is faced with. To be  accepted for publication,  papers  should  focus  on Protocol issues in fast long-distance networks and develop one or several of the following hot topics. High speed transport protocols benchmarking and comparison, test methodologies, experiments on real networks and actual measurements, high speed transport protocols implementation and hardware issues (computer architectures, network interface cards, offload engines, routers, switches, etc.), effects of pacing, shaping, burstiness, forward and reverse concurrent traffic.  We are  soliciting papers  describing both  theoretical and  experimental studies,  with  special emphasis  on  accuracy  of  the work  and  the investigation  of assumptions  that  have been  neglected in  previous works.
Revised and extended versions of papers already presented at conferences (such as pfldnet) are welcome.

Target dates

Editors

For information on the journal Computer Networks Please visit:

• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/13891286
• http://www.elsevier.com/locate/issn/13891286