NSF Workshop on

Future Directions in Smart Networking and Communication

Atlanta, GA
May 05, 2017
Workshop Overview

This NSF workshop focuses on future directions in smart networking and communication. It will be held on on May 5th, 2017, co-located with the IEEE INFOCOM conference in Atlanta, GA. The purpose of the workshop is to collect community inputs and provide feedback to the NSF on several major research areas in smart networking and communication looking ahead in a 5-10 year timeframe. The workshop will include the following discussion thrusts:

    1. Smart network architectures and applications: This thrust will stimulate discussions on new research challenges in emerging smart network architectures and applications. Examples include smart radios, Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous vehicular networks, drone networks, mobile sensing, radio-based sensing, mobile social networks, user and object localization and tracking, wearables and implants communication, and immersive virtual reality on mobile devices.
    2. Smart network analysis, protocols, and optimization: The massive amount of runtime data generated during smart network operations creates new opportunities to better understand the networks, streamline their designs, create upper layer end-to-end networking protocols and achieve optimized network performance. This thrust will discuss how the community can effectively obtain and share real-world data sets and what new challenges the community must address to leverage data analytic techniques, in particular, big data and machine learning technologies in future smart networks. It will also discuss how routing and transport layer protocols may evolve from their well tested classical wireless counterparts by absorbing some of these new techniques and identify the open challenges in cross-layer protocol designs.
    3. Security & privacy: The characteristics, performance and security requirements of smart networks vary considerably from one system to another. The endless variety of applications poses an equally wide variety of security and privacy challenges. This thrust will discuss new fundamental security and privacy problems in the emerging wireless networks, due to their dynamic and diverse network connectivities, weak device protection, and extremely limited computing power, storage space, and energy supply.
    4. City-scale smart network testbed platforms: Obtaining repeatable experimental results is a critical need of the wireless community today. When the testbed is a “city”, running at-scale evaluations is both challenging but incredibly rewarding, as the outcomes directly benefit the general population. This thrust will stimulate discussions on what kind of experimental systems the community wishes to use at the city-scale, what outcomes/results will be interesting to the community, the resources must be made available to encourage development and participation, and finally, how best to overcome the learning curve needed to use such platforms. This thrust will further drive important large scale investment programs by NSF, such as Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR).

The workshop program is available at here. Attendance to this workshop is by invitation only. Click here to view the list of participants. Please contact the workshop organizers Hongyi Wu or Kaushik Chowdhury if you have any questions.