Join us at ACM Sigcomm 2018

ACM SIGCOMM is the flagship conference in computer-networking research. Its participants include leading academics, brilliant students, and representatives of major multinational companies in networking hardware, software, infrastructure, operation, services, online media, advertising, cloud computing, content delivery, and electronic commerce. Centered on its highly selective main track, SIGCOMM published many landmark works in networking and communications. The conference also involves workshops, tutorials, presentation of demos, posters, industrial demos, student research competition, topic previews, mentoring sessions, and award ceremonies.

For the first time in its 24-year history, SIGCOMM comes to Eastern Europe to take place in Budapest on August 20-25. Jennifer Rexford of Princeton University receives the SIGCOMM 2018 Award for Lifetime Contribution and delivers the conference keynote. The SIGCOMM 2018 schedule includes presentations of 40 main-track papers, 12 workshops, 6 tutorials and an annual SIGCOMM hackathon. Complementing the excellence and diversity of the technical program, ACM SIGCOMM 2018 offers an exciting line-up of distinctive social events.

This year’s program includes a balanced mixture of theoretical and practical research that brings significant advancement in well-established fields like Congestion Control, Wireless Communication, and Internet Routing, as well as in brand-new areas like Intent-based Networking and Network Verification, or IoT and Low Power Wireless Communication. Perhaps the IoT sessions promise the most vivid scenery, with groundbreaking contributions to wireless beam-forming, MIMO, noise cancellation and ultra-low power sensor communications. Similarly to battery-less wireless backscatter communication first proposed at SIGCOMM 2013, these new results may also prove essential in shaping the future of IoT. Of further interest is the rise of machine learning in networking, with highlights as the application of deep learning for traffic optimization in large-scale data centers, and Network Verification, with two papers presenting intriguing new designs for debugging data-plane programs written in the P4 language.

Continuing with the SIGCOMM traditions, the program also includes 10 satellite workshops that provide a smaller focused forum for an expert audience to discuss advancing research areas including Big Data Analytics, Cybersecurity, and Self-Driving Networks. In addition, close-to 40 demos will be presented during the conference where academia and industry will demonstrate working prototypes and live test beds of the newest of network architectures and protocols.

Ericsson started supporting ACM Sigcomm conferences in 2012, and since then our commitment and support has increased. Ericsson Research employees as well as students and professors at our strategic university partner projects have been co-authors not only of full papers at the regular conference, but also bringing demonstrations to the conference. Furthermore, we have been active in organizing workshops co-located with Sigcomms of past years and have been increasingly active in helping in the organization.

In 2018, several people from Ericsson Research are in the organization committee(Szabolcs Malomsoky, István Gódor and András Császár). Our long-time strategic university partner (HSNLab @ BME) not only participates strongly in the organization committee (Balázs Sonkoly, Gábor Rétvári, Zalán Heszberger and Levente Csikor) but also delegates a general co-chair (János Tapolcai). It’s worth noting that Ericsson founded HSNLab @ BME University more than 25 years ago, a highlight of its own!

Ericsson will present 4 demos at this year’s Sigcomm and we are co-authors of a NetCompute workshop paper. You are welcome to listen to these presentations.

• In the Industrial Demo titled “Scalable Per Subscriber QoS with Core-Stateless Scheduling” we show a novel packet marking and scheduling technique on a virtual router product which scales well with the increasing number of users, while it provides the desired resource sharing among subscribers.
  
  

• In the Industrial Demo titled “QoC-aware Remote Control of a Hexapod Platform“ we demonstrate technologies to enable ultra-low-latency communication required to operate robots from the cloud and present use-cases for cloud-based control.
  
  

• In the demo titled “Controlling Drones from 5G Networks” we show a distributed cloud system geared towards 5G to enable real-time control of drones.
  
  

• In the demo titled “BB-Gen: A Packet Crafter for P4 Target Evaluation” we show a packet crafter and table generator tool that given a P4 application and a corresponding user configuration results in packet and table traces to carry automated performance evaluation tasks
  
  

• In the NetCompute 2018 paper titled “MP-HULA: Multipath Congestion Aware Load-Balancing using Programmable Data Planes” we describe a Multipath TCP (MPTCP) friendly datacenter load balancing scheme called MP-HULA which halves the flow completion time of MPTCP connections. Implementation of MP-HULA uses the emerging network programming language P4, so it can be deployed to any P4-capable software and hardware switches.

You can also catch us at the Welcome reception Monday, 20 August.

We look forward to meeting you in Budapest!

About the venue – Vigado

This year Sigcomm will take in Budapest in a historical ballroom called Vigado. Vigado lays in the very center of Budapest at the river bank on the Pest side. When Vigado was built, 200 years ago charity balls took a central role in collecting donations for public purposes, thus it was built to be the main venue of the highest culture. The building several important banquets, conferences, and meeting, for example, Budapest was born there by the merger of the old cities of Pest, Buda, and Óbuda (old Buda). The Vigadó also developed a rich concert life with world-famous composers and conductors, like Ferenc Liszt, Richard Wagner, Johann Strauss Jr., Mascagni, Dvořak, Debussy, Arthur Rubinstein, Béla Bartók, Sergey Prokofiev, etc.

If we look at the structure of the building, the most important part is the decorative staircase. Of course, there is a ballroom where the Sigcomm presentations will be held, and where Ferenc Liszt has gave most of his concerts, but the real dazzling beauty is considered to be this staircase.