Call for Paper Conference

Rome, Italy, December 1, 2009
http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2009/workshops/unet/

Submission Deadline: July 17, 2009
Submit at: http://edas.info/N7753

*Motivation*

This workshop is dedicated to the debate of concepts, challenges, and opportunities concerning user-provided networking, i.e., scenarios where users cooperate by sharing wireless resources as well as Internet services.
To provide a specific example that relates to Internet Access (connectivity),
the end-user (or a community of end-users) is a micro-operator in the sense that he/she shares his/her subscribed broadband Internet access based on some form of incentive scheme. In addition, the end-user may or may not provide other network functionality such as local mobility management, or persistent storage and forwarding services. This new role is disruptive in what concerns Internet service models, since there is no distinction between what is today known as end-user device and network device: in the future, end-user devices will actively participate as part of the network. In contrast, the Internet has been up to now mostly the means for end-users to obtain some form of network service, originally related to connectivity, person-to-person communication, or information retrieval. Such user-centric provider role is also disruptive given that the regular network boundaries of trust have to be extended in a way that should mimic social behavior: there is the need to form networks of trust in order to accommodate a robust network growth, given that the key to such growth is the willingness to cooperate.

Another disruptive aspect of user-provided networking is that due to the nature of the wireless media and the way that humans move, support for intermittent connectivity as well as fast and transparent roaming between micro-operators needs to be considered. Finally, and given that user-provided networking spreads
dynamically having as network elements regular end-user devices, there is the need to
consider cases where information is opportunistically relayed instead of routed based
on topological information.

Due to the disruptive aspects mentioned, user-provided networking seem to have the potential to provide a paradigm shift in Internet communication models, given that such novel functionality allow wireless networks to operate in a completely autonomic way and also given that the end-user becomes a provider of Internet services (e.g. connectivity) based upon cooperation incentives or rewards and based
upon his/her own mobility and social patterns. Services are established on the fly, and do not necessarily imply the use of multihop technology or routing. For instance, connectivity may be, in most cases, simply relayed.

The workshop program will include presentations of peer-reviewed papers and a discussion panel with guests from industry and academia. We envision U-NET as a
forum aiming to ignite a debate concerning technical challenges and impact (negatively or positively) that user-provided networking may have on Internet communication models.

*Topics*

U-NET'09 solicits high quality technical contributions within the context of
user-provided networking. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
* Challenges and opportunities for access providers.
* Impact on Internet architectures.
* Internet connectivity.
* Trust models, incentives to share broadband access.
* Human behaviour and mobility patterns.
* Self-organization.
* Wireless cooperation.

Papers submitted are expected to be highly innovative and may incorporate early stage ideas; position papers (clearly identified as such) pointing to new directions and capable of generating discussion are also welcome.
Submission must be original and not already published in any other conference proceeding or journal. Proceedings of the workshop will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

*Submissions*

Submitted papers must be at most 6 (six) pages long (including figures,
tables and references) in the standard ACM double column format. All text
must use font sizes of 10 points or larger. Longer submissions will not be reviewed. The review process is single-blind. Submissions will be done via EDAS at http://edas.info/N7753.

*Important Dates*

Submissions due: July 17, 2009
Notification of acceptance: September 4, 2009
Camera ready version due: October 1, 2009
Workshop date: December 1, 2009

*Program Committee*

PC Chairs

Paulo Mendes, INESC Porto, Portugal
Olivier Marcé, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, France

Technical Program Committee

Rute Sofia, INESC Porto, Portugal
André Zúquete, University of Aveiro, Portugal
Vassilis Kostakos, University of Madeira, Portugal
Jon Crowcroft, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Cecilia Mascolo, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Eiko Yoneki, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Dirk Trossen, British Telecom Innovate, United Kingdom
Prosper Chemouli, France Telecom, France
Martin May, Thomson Paris Research Laboratory, France
Karen Sollins, MIT, USA
Lixia Zhang, UCLA, USA
James Kempf, Ericsson Research, USA
Dipankar Raychaudhuri, Rutgders University, USA
Bernhard Plattner, ETH, Switzerland
George Polyzos, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
Maria Papadopouli, FORTH/University of Creete, Greece
Anand Prasand, NEC, Japan
Gunnar Karlsson, KTH, Sweden
Yevgeni Koucheryavy, Tampere University of Technology, Finland
Marcus Brunner, NEC, Germany
Petri Mähönen, RWTH Aachen University, Germany