NETSTAT 2013 - IEEE International Workshop on Networking across disciplines: Communication Networks, Complex Systems and Statistical Physics (NETSTAT)

Communication networks experience a culmination in their evolution, as they have evolved into multifarious architectural paradigms (such as sensory, mobile ad-hoc, wireless peer-to-peer or femto-cell based), while a myriad of heterogeneous devices create a networked environment of unprecedented complexity. Parallel to that, social networking creates a stratum of user interaction that has a profound impact on the way information is accessed and retrieved. The increasing quest for information in today's networked world, together with the need to efficiently access, handle and transport the torrents of information call for real-time online decision making and optimal control, oftentimes amidst partial state information. A more efficient use of network resources becomes increasingly more important, due to the substantial energy consumption by communication systems in general, and by routers in particular, and increasing pressure on existing infrastructure. Complex behaviors are anticipated as more entities become embedded in the massive internet infrastructure, giving rise to non-trivial microscopic interactions which in turn influence global system behaviors at the macroscopic level.
Statistical physics aims at understanding the collective behavior of large disordered systems of heterogeneous, randomly interacting components that engage in localized interactions. It provides a solid framework for studying how small-scale randomness generates global-scale phenomena like phase transitions, which are essentially nonrandom and are governed by system parameters and external conditions. Recent success stories in understanding the nature of hard combinatorial problems attest to the strong potential of insights offered by statistical physics. The decoding process of Shannon-capacity approaching codes in digital communication and the construction of new codes benefitted from such insights. Belief propagation approaches that emanate from statistical physics have facilitated the landmark achievement of reaching the information theoretic capacity in different types of noisy channels.
The NETSTAT workshop aims at bringing together individuals from a number of communities such as communication theory, information theory, networking, and statistical physics with the following objectives:
Delineate a common foundational framework at the interface between these disciplines;
harness techniques that are inspired from statistical physics principles to advance state of the art in information communication theory and network optimization problems;
propose methods that remove the barrier of combinatorial complexity in network control problems by leveraging statistical physics based techniques;
enhance statistical physics methodologies with a pragmatic view dictated by networking problems and rigorous approaches by the information theory community.
Topics Of Interest
Original contributions are solicited in areas that include (but are not limited to) the following:
Statistical physics inspired techniques for communication network modeling and resource allocation
Information Communication theory and statistical physics
Network inference problems and approaches based on statistical physics
Non-cooperative and cooperative game models for networks
Compressed sensing and application in networking problems
Statistical physics inspired techniques for social networking problems
Applications of belief propagation techniques in wireless networking, in information theory, and in digital communication
Phase transition phenomena in digital communications and networking
Disordered systems, glass systems theory and other statistical physics principles, and their applications to information theory and networking
Network inference problems