Call for Papers

Despite lots of discussion in academia and industry, there isn’t consensus about how big a router buffer should be. Originally, we had the rule of thumb that the buffer should equal the bandwidth-delay product, but many networks no longer follow this guideline. Choosing a buffer size is inherently complicated: It depends on (at least) the congestion control algorithm, AQM (marking and dropping policies), load-balancing, traffic engineering and the applications generating the traffic. So far, there has been some measurement and theory, but little consensus.

The goal of this workshop is to improve our understanding of how to pick buffer sizes in different parts of the network (e.g. DC, WAN, last mile, WiFi, cellular), for different applications (video, HPC, Hadoop-like, financial) and for different congestion control algorithms. Ideally, we would like to establish, from a mix of theoretical and experimental results, guidelines that can be used in practice to size routers’ buffers, and provide guidance to semiconductor and equipment providers.

We solicit contributions in the following areas:

We accept two types of contribution: (1) a 4-6 page paper, possibly pointing to some additional online material, or (2) a 2 page proposal for a talk or for an experience report. Please use the SIGCOMM style file for LaTeX submissions, and equivalent formatting for non-LaTeX submissions. Reviewing will be single blind, please include author names on the submitted paper.

Contributions will be reviewed to verify the technical correctness of the material presented in the paper. The authors of accepted papers and proposals will be invited to give a talk at the workshop in December, at Stanford University. Accepted papers will be posted online, and technical papers which are at least 5 pages will be posted to the ACM Digital Library.

Important dates:

Note: To help make the workshop fruitful, the workshop material will be made available online a week before the event. Attendees who do not have a presentation will be asked to explain their motivation for attending in 2 sentences.

Thank you to our sponsors