[hpc-announce] New submission deadline: March 1, 2024 - COMCOM Special Issue on "Large-scale Experimental Platforms for Computer and Networking Research: Recent Advances and Challenges"

[Raffaele Bruno]

(Apologies for cross-posting)

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ELSEVIER Computer Communications Journal
Special Issue on Large-scale Experimental Platforms for Computer and Networking Research: Recent Advances and Challenges

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Important dates
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- Submission deadline: March 1, 2024
- Expected publication: 3rd Quarter 2024

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Motivation and Scope
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Experimentation plays a crucial role in advancing research in computing and networking. Significant efforts have been placed over the last fifteen years towards defining, deploying, and operating experimental infrastructures that can support the requirements of large-scale experimental research on the future Internet and next-generation mobile networks, which are becoming hyper-converged infrastructures encompassing sensing, communication, networking, computation, and data analytics components, addressing different application domains and vertical use cases. 

Several testing platforms have emerged worldwide, such as Fed4FIRE, FIT, OneLab in Europe, Chameleon, FABRIC, PAWR in the US, CINI in China, which are typically accompanied with tools for the experiment lifecycle control. Although such platforms are used by thousands of users every year to carry out experiments on future Internet technologies and services and advanced wireless networking, these facilities are still fragmented and focused on specific vertical applications. Furthermore, they mostly fail to provide a common resource description framework and standardised approaches and APIs offering a trusted, open and scalable monitoring, data management and experimental control plane, which could ease the reproducibility of experiments, lower the effort needed to build a new experiment, and facilitate the sharing of experimental results and benchmarks. Finally, and most importantly, they do not support complete end-to-end experimentation where diverse set of resources and software components at all layers of the system are stitched together in a controllable manner. However, emerging virtualisation and software-enabled networking technologies, programmable packet processing devices and wireless components, and orchestration platforms for cloud-native containerised services are opening the way for a new generation of research infrastructures providing the ability to program the infrastructure and allowing a more agile and on-demand resource provisioning. 

The goal of this special issue is to attract original, previously unpublished papers addressing key practical challenges and issues in experimental digital infrastructures, including wireless, IoT, edge, cloud and applications. We are particularly interested in papers highlighting new technologies, enablers, management frameworks, and tools for deploying large-scale experimental platforms that can support experiments automation and reproducibility, and FAIR data management. In addition, we seek papers describing developments, lesson-learned and new results obtained through beyond state-of-the-art large-scale test platforms for at-scale research in the area of future Internet including beyond 5G infrastructures. Experimental platforms should be able to address the end-to-end scenario, integrating all technologies and components. 

Topics of interest comprise, but are not limited to:
- Use case scenarios for future network testbeds 
- Architecture, APIs and standards for experiment design and life-cycle management
- Cloud and edge-based computing architectures and services
- Computing architectures for lightweight wireless devices
- Platforms and services for resource virtualisation, provision, and orchestration in the device-- edge-cloud-continuum
- Tools and services for testbed users and operators
- Interoperability/co-existence/inter-programmability among the testbeds
- Data management, sharing and reproducibility
- AI applied to infrastructure operation and optimisation at all layers
- Experience and lessons learned by deploying large-scale networked systems
- Digital twins for large-scale networked systems 
- Design and evaluation of testbeds for wired network experimentation (including optical networks)
- Design and evaluation of testbeds for advanced wireless technologies and spectrum frontiers
- Design and evaluation of testbeds for integrated sensing and communications
- Business models for Testbed-as-a-Service platforms 
- Standard testbed models 


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Guest-editors
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Raffaele Bruno (IIT-CNR, Italy)
Serge Fdida (Sorbonne University, France)
Abhimanyu (Manu) Gosain (Northeastern University, USA)
Akihiro Nakao (University of Tokyo, Japan)

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Instructions for submission:
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Manuscripts must not have been previously published nor currently under review by other journals or conferences. If the paper was published in a conference, the submitted manuscript should be a substantial extension of the conference paper. Authors are also required to submit their published conference articles and a summary document explaining the enhancements made in the journal version. Papers must be submitted through the COMCOM's submission system (https://www.editorialmanager.com/comcom/), while guidelines for the manuscript preparation can be found at COMCOM's website (http://ees.elsevier.com/comcom). To ensure that all manuscripts are correctly identified for consideration by the Special Issue, the authors should select "VSI: TEST PLATFORMS" when they reach the “Article Type” step in the submission process.