Proceedings of the 2012 ACM workshop on Capacity sharing

Welcome to the Capacity Sharing Workshop at ACM CoNEXT 2012. Managing network capacity in general has always been an operator concern, but the conversion of traditional media distribution to IP technologies and the growing bandwidth demand for new cloud-based applications incur a new level of traffic management requirements - especially for mobile communication networks. The importance of the topic is reflected by 3GPP work on "User plane congestion management," IETF work on Congestion Exposure (ConEx) and by data center optimizations for transport protocols and resource management. The main research question is how to enable meaningful resource sharing taking account of different, sometimes conflicting, interests. The topic is related to established networking research topics such as transport protocols, traffic management, radio resource management and can be seen as an application area for new topics such as Software-Defined Networking. This workshop will be helpful drawing together research activities in these different fields and for identifying missing pieces and potential future research topics. Investigating this topic at a CoNEXT workshop will be beneficial for assessing new ideas for capacity sharing and new networking technologies that can be employed for it. Capacity Sharing is also an area where more results from networking experiments are needed (for example on larger scale deployment of IETF ConEx technologies), and we believe that CoNEXT-2012 is a good venue to review these results. With the help of an excellent technical program committee of 25 international researchers, we selected 9 interesting papers for the final workshop program that, as we believe, address important current research topics in the fields and are suitable to create interesting and fruitful discussions. We hope that the workshop proceedings will serve as a valuable reference for researchers and developers in the field and that the discussions at the workshop will be fruitful for future research on capacity sharing.