ACM LCDNet 2013 - The 1st ACM MobiCom Workshop on Lowest Cost Denominator Networking for Universal Access

Internet has crossed new frontiers with access getting faster and cheaper. New applications and services are being offered and their impact omnipresent. The Internet Society's recent global Internet survey reveals that the Internet should be considered as a basic human birthright. On one end, we have the developed world where access is getting faster and services being developed to utilize faster access. On the other end, there are people who do not have access to the Internet at all. Some may not be able to get it due to lack of infrastructure support (which accounts to the notion of digital divide problem faced by most people in developed countries). There have been signi?cant initiatives to solve the problem of affordable infrastructure. Crucially, most of these approaches address infrastructural barriers without addressing economic ones. Leaving connectivity for all to be governed by market economics is a major impediment to achieving the full benefits of the Internet, and that basic Internet access should be made freely available to all due to its societal benefits. The current Internet access model which is governed by market economics makes it practically infeasible for enabling universal access especially for those with socio-economic barriers. The value chains do not reflect the technical development, as made obvious by recent debates between operators and content providers.
There are both research and policy challenges to the realization of a future Internet capability that will offer appropriate access to all parts of society. The current Internet architecture is progressively reaching a saturation point in meeting increasing user's expectations and behaviors as well as progressively showing inability to efficiently respond to new technological challenges (in terms of security, scalability, mobility, availability, and manageability) but also socio-economical challenges. This widening range of requirements imposed on the Internet architecture leads to a growing collection of solutions, which each in their own right address a set of requirement while driving forward the fragmentation that ultimately stands in the way of achieving the digital inclusion vision. In contrast to the way the current Internet has evolved, the development of the next generation network will demand both collaboration and a shared vision between researchers, corporations, community groupings and governments. There can be no single uniform solution that embraces all types of user and all locations. We need an infrastructure that combines different transmission technologies, while at the same time support an increasingly diverse range of Internet applications. The research community should also encourage, identify and architect new modes of access that could increase the efficiency of the usage of existing communication resources, enhance cooperation among operators, cooperation among end users, improving access/accounting on a per service basis rather than on a per volume basis, enable "sponsoring" of access to communication as such as well as to selected services.
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This workshop will address the problem of digital exclusion due to both geographical and socio-economic disparity. We would like also to pay attention to specific types of exclusion like temporal exclusion caused by catastrophes (in terms of an earthquake or tsunami) and malicious activities. In such situations, the poorest communities suffer the most. Technologies that require an infrastructure setup may sometimes be not feasible due to cost, accessibility or availability. Hence the use of alternate technologies that enable cooperative networking e.g. multi-hop ad-hoc set-ups, or delay tolerant communication based approaches might save lives, and mitigate suffering of numerous victims.
ACM LCDNet 2013 will address a range of research questions (feasibility, scalability, security, new privacy challenges, robustness, resource allocation, sustainability, performance etc.). We solicit contributions on state-of-the-art, results of ongoing research, open issues, trends and new ideas. We strongly encourage out-of-the box thinking and the workshop will have a dedicated session focusing on blue-skies research within the context of the workshop.
For More Information
For questions about the ACM LCDNet 2013 Workshop please send email to workshop chairs: Jon Crowcroft, Arjuna Sathiaseelan, Emmanuel Lochin.
The Workshop Scope
Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to:
1. Innovations in wireless and satellite technologies that enable efficient low cost spectrum use
2. Characterising broadband performance
3. Advancements in Information-centric networking, delay-tolerant networking, cloud onloading/offloading to improve access and reduce average
transmission cost per service access
4. Effectively utilising unused capacity using state of art network virtualization techniques to realize low-cost access
5. Multi-layer resource pooling
6. Social networking based communications during disasters
7. Supporting effectively different service classes, with authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) for different traffic/service types
8. Security and privacy concerns
9. New applications and services utilising low cost models
10. Socio-economic models for adoption and deployment
11. Related projects and reports of experience
Committees
Organizing Committee
Jon Crowcroft (University of Cambridge, UK)
Arjuna Sathiaseelan (University of Cambridge, UK)
Emmanuel Lochin (ISAE, France)
Program Committee
Adam Wolisz (TKN, Berlin)
Scott Burleigh (JPL, NASA, USA)
Dirk Trossen (University of Cambridge, UK)
Michael Welzl (University of Oslo, Norway)
Mahesh Marina (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Richard Mortier (University of Nottingham, UK)
Joerg Ott (Aalto University, Finland)
Eiko Yoneki (University of Cambridge, UK)
Achilles Petras (BT, UK)
Roksana Boreli (NICTA, Australia)
Laurent Franck (Telecom Bretagne, France)
Balaji Rengarajan (IMDEA, Spain)
Milena Radenkovic (University of Nottingham, UK)
Ioannis Psaras (UCL, UK)
Pasi Sarolahti (Aalto University, Finland)
Pierre-Ugo Tournoux (Reunion Island University, France)
Marcelo Dias de Amorim (LIP6, France)
Vassilios Tsaoussidis (DUTH, Greece)
Submission
Full papers: ACM LCDNet 2013 Workshop will consider only original papers that are not currently under review by other workshops, conferences, or journals, and have not been published. All papers submitted to ACM LCDNet 2013 will be peer-reviewed and evaluated based on their suitability (i.e., within the workshop scope), novelty, and merit. Submitted papers are limited to 6 pages and should be submitted as a PDF file, including all figures and references.
Posters: Proposals for poster presentations featuring early research work and preliminary results are strongly encouraged and solicited. The ACM LCDNet 2013 poster session will provide an excellent opportunity for initial feedback on early research results and for gaining early visibility of ongoing projects. The submission should be formatted as a paper or extended abstract describing the research to be presented in the poster and should be submitted as a PDF file of at most 3 pages, including all figures and references.
All submissions should be formatted in standard ACM conference style for publication in the conference proceedings. They must be single-spaced, double-column, with each column 9.25" by 3.33", 0.33" space between columns, use at least a 10pt font, and be correctly formatted to be printed on letter-sized (8.5" by 11") paper. It is required that at least one author of each accepted paper register and attend the ACM LCDNet 2013 workshop to present their work to ensure its publication in the ACM LCDNet 2013 conference proceedings.
We strongly encourage people from both of the industry and academia to submit their fine work to ACM LCDNet 2013.