NSF Workshop on Fundamental Research in
Networking
Airlie House, April 24-25, 2003
Scope
Since the
establishment of a networking research program at the NSF in 1987, three
NSF sponsored workshops have addressed fundamental research in networking.
Since the last of these workshops, held in 1994, both the networking
research community and its research agenda have rapidly evolved.
Two trends
strongly motivate the organization of a new workshop: the significantly
broadening of the scope of networking research and the dramatic growth of the
network research community. The range of topics of proposals in the networking
area is continuously broadening, and now includes, among many other new topics,
wireless sensor networks, ubiquitous computing, peer-to-peer networks, optical
networks, network security, Internet measurements, control theory applications
in networking, and cross-layer optimizations. At this time, there is hardly a
researcher in computer science or electrical engineering, who does not, directly
or indirectly, include networking aspects in his/her research agenda. The
central role of network research in computer science and engineering has led to
a significant growth of the research community.
A need for a new
workshop also arises from a growing sense that, due to the broadening of the
scope of network research and the growth of the community, fundamental network
research at the NSF is currently being shortchanged. For example, the number of
proposals submitted to networking research in 2002 has doubled, as compared to
the previous year, with a tendency of further increase, but the research budget
has not experienced the same pace of increase. At the same time, industry and
mission-oriented government agencies have broadly reduced, if not entirely
eliminated, basic networking research from their agendas. There is a rising need
to better understand how to improve the ability of NSF to foster visionary and
far-reaching research in networking.
This workshop will
prepare a report that will be available to the community and can help to better
articulate the future research agenda in networking; it will stimulate
far-reaching future research initiatives, collaborations and evolvement of the
community. The workshop will identify major issues affecting fundamental
research in networking for the future. Tentative goals and discussion points
include, but are not limited to: revisit the issues related to fundamental
networking research; revisit the importance of networking research in the
context of rapid changes in technologies and science. What are the research
methodologies? How to deal with the issues of areas that are overlooked/
overemphasized? How to strengthen the networking research program within NSF?
What are the current, short-term and long-term needs, and how do you distinguish
among them? How can the community evolve? How can the vision of the community be
best articulated?
Organizing Committee:
Mostafa
Ammar
Jorg Liebeherr*
Biswanath Mukherjee
Ness Shroff *
Don Towsley
Nitin Vaidya
Hui Zhang
(* Co-organizers)
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