Conference: Community Workshop on Long-term Research Directions in Wired Networking

This Computer networks form one of the most critical infrastructures for our society, contributing to essentially every component of our daily lives–communication, businesses, safety-critical services, education, and even medical practices. Over the past several decades, our community has done a tremendous job in identifying and resolving important research problems, and in many cases, translating research outcomes to practice. The result is a robust, reliable, and efficient Internet infrastructure. However, the computer network infrastructure has evolved over the last decade partly to accommodate the new challenges introduced by platforms and applications that have emerged over this period (e.g., cloud computing, distributed data analytics, etc.). The next decade is likely to bring similar—if not more significant—challenges; some of these challenges are already evident: new applications are emerging rapidly, cloud providers are incorporating new hardware and software infrastructure to respond to new application requirements, and the Internet structure is already evolving. This workshop brings together researchers from computer networking, computer architecture, operating systems, distributed systems, computer security, and theory to discuss, identify and document the “long-term” research directions in wired networks. The key goal is to have academic and industry researchers and practitioners begin a collaborative discussion so as to build a more reliable, robust, and efficient next-generation computer network infrastructure. This workshop will have a broad impact both in terms of focused research progress from the academic community, as well as potential impact via industry engagement. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.