IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization
28 June–2 July 2021 // Virtual Conference

Call for Workshop Papers

Aims and Scope

The 7th IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft 2021) will be held on June 28-July 2, 2021 in Tokyo, Japan. IEEE NetSoft has been created as a flagship conference aimed at addressing the softwarization of networks and systemic trends concerning the convergence of Cloud Computing, Software-Defined Networking (SDN), and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).

Like in past years, IEEE NetSoft will host a set of workshops. The purpose of the workshops is to complement the conference program with in-depth or integration forums that are dedicated to emerging topics and/or topics specifically related to IEEE NetSoft 2021. Accepted and presented workshop papers will be published in the conference proceedings and will be submitted for inclusion in IEEE Xplore.

Workshops

TaPoPF: Workshop on Theory and Practice of Programmable Forwarding

Workshop Pagehttps://www.cs.cornell.edu/~jnfoster/tapopf21/

Over the past decade, computer networks have been transformed into an end-to-end programmable platform. Early work on SDN largely focused on on the control plane, but more recent efforts on NFV, P4, etc. have also made the forwarding plane programmable. Hence, for the first time, network owners now have full control over the software executing in their networks. The question then becomes: what should they do with this new-found capability?  We imagine the workshop will mostly focus on the following broad questions:

  • Programming Models: What are good models for programming the forwarding plane? Many software targets utilize general-purpose languages such as eBPF or DPDK. But these languages are hard to map down to hardware targets. Conversely, many hardware targets utilize domain-specific languages such as P4 or NPL. But these languages are computationally restricted and cannot express complex network functions that make significant use of state. Is there a way to combine the best of both approaches?
  • Hardware Platforms: With the end of Moore’s Law and ever-increasing links speeds, the need for programmable hardware seems inevitable. Cloud providers are already equipping physical hosts with hardware accelerators based on FPGAs or SmartNICs – a trend that is likely to continue. What are promising architectures for packet processing in hardware? What are the key trade offs, and how can we balance flexibility, efficiency, predictability, and performance?
  • Applications: Early programmable forwarding platforms were mostly used to implement custom protocols or simple enhancements like in-band network telemetry. But the community has also started to explore ideas such as in-network computing (e.g., NetCache [SOSP ’17]), systems in which algorithms traditionally realized in the control plane are instead pushed into the data plane (e.g., HULA [SOSR ’16], CONGA [SIGCOMM ’14], CONTRA [NSDI ’20]), and even forms of active networking (e.g., TPP [SIGCOMM ’16]). What is the right division of labor between the control plane and the data plane? Between the network and end hosts? How can we utilize programmability to enhance traditional network services such as congestion control (e.g., HPCC [SIGCOMM ’19]). And what are techniques for realizing sophisticated algorithms on resource-limited devices?
  • Verification: The emergence of programmable forwarding has been matched by growing interest in network verification. Intuitively, if networks are specified in software, then we should be able to use traditional program verification techniques to reason about networks behavior. Indeed, researchers have developed scalable techniques for reasoning about network control planes (e.g., Minesweeper [SIGCOMM ’17]) and data planes (e.g., p4v [SIGCOMM ’17]). The next questions are how we can use these newfound reasoning capabilities to address security and reliability issues.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together a diverse group of researchers and practitioners to discuss recent research results and identify future challenges related to programmable forwarding.

Workshop Chair: Nate Foster, Cornell University, USA

Submission link:
Full papers: https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=28100&track=105238

Important Dates:

  • Submission: March 5, 2021 [FIRM!]
  • Notification: March 28, 2021
  • Camera-Ready: April 25, 2021
  • Workshop: June 28, 2021

S4SI 2021: 4th Workshop on Advances in Slicing for Softwarized Infrastructures

Workshop pagehttps://intrig.dca.fee.unicamp.br/s4si2021/

Since its conception, S4SI has aimed at providing a focused international forum for researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, network operators, and service providers to discuss and address the advances and the challenges in the multi-faceted field of Slicing plus its emerging scenarios whereby systems, services, and workflows used in both computing and communications domains are converging and can benefit from the new techniques and strategies of infrastructure softwarization. The current trend of convergence between computing and networking eco-systems puts software into an unprecedented and dominant role in operational communication environments. Computing, storage andconnectivity services along with application instances are foreseen to be dynamically deployed in the form of slices of virtualized assets within a so-called Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI) leveraging general-purpose processing and communication hardware, altogether being flexible managed and made available under “As-a-Service” paradigms in spirit of Cloud Computing. This concept is summarized in the idea of Slicing which has become a central piece in the evolution of telecom networks, as we witnessed in the past three editions of S4SI, as well as in other scientific and industrial venues.

The S4SI workshop addresses beyond state of the art approaches for both the advances and challenges related to Slicing in Softwarized Infrastructures, aiming for a faster and improved deployment of services in current and future 5G environments. The advances and challenges are expected to be multiple, and there are clearly many open questions that need to be addressed, including:

  • At what level of abstraction slicing should be introduced, i.e., whether it is better implementing slicing mechanisms into existing frameworks, orchestrators and infrastructure managers via adapting their components, or it is more convenient implementing slicing in a way that it will be transparent to them;
  • What abstraction models, APIs and mechanisms would be required in order to implement slicing in any of the above scenarios, and what the tradeoff between complexity and performance would be;
  • How do the existing resource technologies of computing, storage and network can seamlessly be managed, orchestrated and controlled as part of end-to-end slices
  • How end-to-end slices can automatically be defined and allocated on-demand – as a service – to host network services with similar requirements in terms of SLA and QoS
  • What APIs, algorithms and orchestration mechanisms are required for secure and optimized communication between co-located slices in order to enable B2B synergies
  • How to integrate novel approaches that could facilitate the lifecycle management of slices on SDI, like intent-based mechanisms, smart operation based on Artificial Intelligence, etc.
  • How to exploit advanced technologies at both control and data planes for the realization of slices

S4SI aims at addressing the multiple open questions around the realization of end-to-end sliced softwarized infrastructures and the fundamental challenges that will facilitate the envisioned intelligent orchestration and programmability of SDIs, enabling faster deployment and efficient operation of integrated services across different resource domains. Such advances in future ecosystems, like 5G and beyond, are expected to enable dynamic establishment of generalized virtual function chains, according to service requirements.

Workshop Chairs:

  • R. Pasquini, University of Uberlandia, Brazil
  • Alex Galis, University College London, UK
  • Christian Esteve Rothenberg, University of Campinas, Brazil
  • Panagiotis Papadimitriou, University of Macedonia, Greece

Submission link:
Full papers: https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=28057&track=104979

Important Dates:

  • Submission: March 5, 2021 [FIRM!]
  • Notification: March 28, 2021
  • Camera-Ready: April 25, 2021
  • Workshop: June 28, 2021

SecSoft 2021: 3rd International Workshop on Cyber-Secuirty Threats, Trust and Privacy Management in Software-Defined and Virtualized Infrastructures

Workshop Pagehttps://www.astrid-project.eu/secsoft/

The growing virtualization and softwarization of networks and computing infrastructures is bringing unprecedented agility in the creation of digital services. From a technical perspective, the creation of digital services consists in “chaining” several processes, software, and devices, and feeding them with relevant user’s data and context. In this respect, convergence among existing software paradigms, such as cloud computing, software-defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), and the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to this purpose, leveraging autonomicity and dynamic composition through service-oriented and everything-as-a-service models applied to virtualized infrastructures and cyber-physical systems. Unfortunately, the evolution of cyber-security paradigms has not gone with the same pace, leading to a substantial difficulty in protecting the new forms of distributed and heterogeneous systems against cyber-threats. This is especially worrying when considering that part of this overwhelming technological evolution is already encompassing critical infrastructures and industrial systems, such as smart grid components. Indeed, the growing complexity and the multi-domain nature make digital services ever more vulnerable to security breaches, due to human errors in design, implementation, configuration, and management. Relying on individual’s ability for hardening, verification of security properties, attack detection, and threat identification is no longer practical, and that is clearly an unacceptable practice especially when critical infrastructures and large chains are involved.

The main purpose of this workshop is to integrate the “Security, Safety, Trust and Privacy in virtualized environments” conference topic. Beyond security mechanisms at the hypervisor or domain level, the softwarization of legacy security appliances, and federation schemes between multiple domains, this workshop will look ahead to more dynamic, agile, and autonomic forms of detection and reaction of advanced threats, including the persistence ones. The specific focus will be on secure and trustworthy digital services, including pure virtual services as well as cyber-physical systems. The objective is to stimulate a constructive discussion on overall frameworks and specific aspects that are necessary to build wide situational awareness and to timely counter cyber-attacks: pervasive monitoring and deep inspection, cross-correlation in time and space dimensions and detection, automated control and management of complex orchestratable systems, forensics and legal investigation, trustworthiness and privacy.

Workshop Chairs:

  • Fulvio Valenza, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
  • Thanassis Giannetsos, Technical University of Denmark
  • Nicholas Kolokotronis, University of Peloponnese, Greece

Submission link:
Full papers: https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=28058

Important Dates:

  • Submission: March 5, 2021 [FIRM!]
  • Notification: March 28, 2021
  • Camera-Ready: April 25, 2021
  • Workshop: July 2, 2021

SoftIoT: 2nd Workshop on Network Softwarization Techniques for IoT

Workshop Pagehttps://sites.google.com/view/netsoftiot2021/home

The softwarization of networks is enabled by the SDN (Software Defined Networking), NV (Network Virtualization), and NFV (Network Function Virtualization) paradigms, and offers many advantages and convenience for network operators, service providers and datacenter providers. By adopting network softwarization techniques, more and more novel network services and novel applications can be operated and deployed. Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a revolution for the development of futuristic network services and applications. It is one of the hottest trends in technology. IoT is transforming our future by interconnecting everything: humans, vehicles, appliances, utilities, infrastructures, street lights and anything through an intelligent connection. The evolution of IoT has been progressively adopted by various organizations and industrial communities. In IoT environment, the huge amount of data and resources requested by various smart devices and humans can be collected and investigated in an intelligent manner in order to improvise the decision making. Hence, there exists a great need of managing these data and resources in an efficient manner.

Given the strong interest in both industry and academia in the softwarization of telecommunication networks and cloud computing providers, this workshop aims at adopting network softwarization techniques for IoT applications. There are many interesting challenges currently requiring to be addressed by the research community, which aims at efficiently managing softwarized networks for IoT applications.

Workshop Chairs:

  • Longxiang Yang, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China
  • Neeraj Kumar, Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, India
  • Haotong Cao, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China

Submission link:
Full papers: https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=28099&track=105236

Important Dates:

  • Submission: March 5, 2021 [FIRM!]
  • Notification: March 28, 2021
  • Camera-Ready: April 25, 2021
  • Workshop: July 2, 2021

WIN: Workshop on Intent-based Networking

Workshop Pagehttp://www.adda-association.org/win-2021/

The workshop will focus on the topic of Intent-based Networking (IBN) and will explore various facets of this domain such as concepts, design principles and requirements, architectures and functionalities, use cases, evaluation, deployment and experimentations, need and role of standardization and open source, use of intelligent techniques to solve IBN technical problems, etc.

The domain of Intent-based Networking has seen a continuous and rising interest from the research, engineering and operational communities in recent years. One of the contrasting signs of intent-based networking is the co-development of many facets of the technology: concepts and research topics in parallel to early open source and standardization initiatives, technology building blocks and commercial products and services from large companies and start-ups. IBN is clearly an active and developing area in the modern networking landscape.

The goal of the workshop is to offer a forum to the Network Softwarization, Management, Operations and Automation community to learn about the latest advances in the field of intent-based networking, and to outline the importance of these techniques for the future development of modern management and automation platforms.

Workshop Chairs:

  • Laurent Ciavaglia, Nokia, France
  • Eric Renault, ESIEE, France

Submission link:
Full papers: https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=28098&track=105234

Important Dates:

  • Submission: March 5, 2021 [FIRM!]
  • Notification: March 28, 2021
  • Camera-Ready: April 25, 2021
  • Workshop: June 28, 2021

2021 Patrons


  • Platinum

  • ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation logo

    Bronze

  • Hitachi logo

    Bronze

  • NEC logo

    Bronze


  • Bronze

Technical Co-Sponsors