Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments And Technologies

The 2009 ACM Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (ACM CoNEXT 2009) will be held in Rome, Italy. This year, 170 high quality papers covering a diverse set of topics were submitted to the conference. Of these, 29 were selected for presentation following a standard three-round review process, described next. During the first round of reviews, each paper was reviewed by three TPC members (with no delegation allowed). At the end of this round, papers with low reviewer confidence or borderline evaluation were reviewed in the second round by other TPC members, or, in a handful of cases, by an external expert. During the second round, we asked TPC members to rate review quality. This put a certain degree of peer pressure on TPC members to turn in good reviews. Final decisions were made during a one-and-a-half day in-person TPC meeting that was held during ACM SIGCOMM. We started the meeting with a 30 minute discussion on the "nature of CoNEXT." TPC members agreed that the main feature that distinguished the conference was "novelty." Therefore, in evaluating papers, we gave higher weight to novelty, choosing 'risky' papers over 'boringly correct' ones. We recommend that this be continued in the future. During the meeting, papers were discussed in decreasing order of mean reviewer confidence. This worked very well: we did not get tied up in discussions at the start of the meeting over papers where there was not enough understanding in the room. At the end of the first day, the TPC put together a draft program that was then refined during the second meeting. By the end of the second meeting, we selected 29 high quality papers for presentation. Some papers were accepted conditional to certain changes being made and reviewed by a TPC member who acted as a 'shepherd.' The authors of all the other accepted papers were asked to revise their paper considering the comments made by the reviewers and submit the final paper with a letter that states how they had improved their paper. The papers in the conference proceedings therefore have been extensively revised by the authors to account for the reviewers' comments and suggestions. Papers in the conference are organized in eight broad sessions. As usual, novel networking architectures and measurements were popular, topics accounting for two sessions each, with additional sessions on wireless mesh networks, peer-to-peer communication, and privacy and security. The CoNEXT'08 best paper award goes to the paper entitled Content Availability in Swarming Systems: Models, Measurements and Bundling Implications, by D. Menasche, A. Rocha, B. Li, D. Towsley, A. Venkataramani. The paper was not only one of the highest-ranked papers but also has a fine blend of theoretical insight and practical evaluation.