http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~as2330/lcd/lcdnet-2013.html

The 1st ACM MobiCom Workshop on Lowest Cost Denominator Networking for
Universal Access (LCDNet 2013) will be held jointly with ACM MobiCom
on September 30, 2013, in Miami, Florida. It is aimed at bringing
together researchers from academia and industry.

Internet has crossed new frontiers with access getting faster and
cheaper. New applications and services are being offered – and their
impact omnipresent. The Internet Society’s recent global Internet
survey reveals that the Internet should be considered as a basic human
birthright. On one end, we have the developed world where access is
getting faster and services being developed to utilize faster access.
On the other end, there are people who do not have access to the
Internet at all. Some may not be able to get it due to lack of
infrastructure support (which accounts to the notion of digital divide
problem faced by most people in developed countries). There have been
significant initiatives to solve the problem of affordable
infrastructure. Crucially, most of these approaches address
infrastructural barriers without addressing economic ones. Leaving
connectivity for all to be governed by market economics is a major
impediment to achieving the full benefits of the Internet, and that
basic Internet access should be made freely available to all due to
its societal benefits. The current Internet access model which is
governed by market economics makes it practically infeasible for
enabling universal access especially for those with socio-economic
barriers. The value chains do not reflect the technical development –
as made obvious by recent debates between operators and content
providers.

There are both research and policy challenges to the realization of a
future Internet capability that will offer appropriate access to all
parts of society. The current Internet architecture is progressively
reaching a saturation point in meeting increasing user's expectations
and behaviors as well as progressively showing inability to
efficiently respond to new technological challenges (in terms of
security, scalability, mobility, availability, and manageability) but
also socio-economical challenges. This widening range of requirements
imposed on the Internet architecture leads to a growing collection of
solutions, which each in their own right address a set of requirement
while driving forward the fragmentation that ultimately stands in the
way of achieving the digital inclusion vision. In contrast to the way
the current Internet has evolved, the development of the next
generation network will demand both collaboration and a shared vision
between researchers, corporations, community groupings and
governments. There can be no single uniform solution that embraces all
types of user and all locations. We need an infrastructure that
combines different transmission technologies, while at the same time
support an increasingly diverse range of Internet applications. The
research community should also encourage, identify and architect new
modes of access that could increase the efficiency of the usage of
existing communication resources, enhance cooperation among operators,
cooperation among end users, improving access/accounting on a per
service basis rather than on a per volume basis, enable “sponsoring”
of access to communication as such as well as to selected services.

This workshop will address the problem of digital exclusion due to
both geographical and socio-economic disparity. We would like also to
pay attention to specific types of exclusion – like temporal exclusion
caused by catastrophes (in terms of an earthquake or tsunami) and
malicious activities. In such situations, the poorest communities
suffer the most. Technologies that require an infrastructure setup may
sometimes be not feasible due to cost, accessibility or availability.
Hence the use of alternate technologies that enable cooperative
networking – e.g. multi-hop ad-hoc set-ups, or delay tolerant
communication based approaches might save lives, and mitigate
suffering of numerous victims.

ACM LCDNet 2013 will address a range of research questions
(feasibility, scalability, security, new privacy challenges,
robustness, resource allocation, sustainability, performance etc.). We
solicit contributions on state-of-the-art, results of ongoing
research, open issues, trends and new ideas. We strongly encourage
out-of-the box thinking and the workshop will have a dedicated session
focusing on blue-skies research within the context of the workshop.


Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to:

1. Innovations in wireless and satellite technologies that enable
efficient low cost spectrum use
2. Characterising broadband performance
3. Advancements in Information-centric networking, delay-tolerant
networking, cloud onloading/offloading to improve access and reduce
average transmission cost per service access
4. Effectively utilising unused capacity using state of art network
virtualization techniques to realize low-cost access
5. Multi-layer resource pooling
6. Social networking based communications during disasters
7. Supporting effectively different service classes, with
authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) for different
traffic/service types
8. Security and privacy concerns
9. New applications and services utilising low cost models
10. Socio-economic models for adoption and deployment
11. Related projects and reports of experience


Organizing Committee

Jon Crowcroft (University of Cambridge, UK)
Arjuna Sathiaseelan (University of Cambridge, UK)
Emmanuel Lochin (ISAE, France)


Program Committee

Adam Wolisz (TKN, Berlin)
Scott Burleigh (JPL, NASA, USA)
Dirk Trossen (University of Cambridge, UK)
Michael Welzl (University of Oslo, Norway)
Mahesh Marina (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Richard Mortier (University of Nottingham, UK)
Joerg Ott (Aalto University, Finland)
Eiko Yoneki (University of Cambridge, UK)
Achilles Petras (BT, UK)
Roksana Boreli (NICTA, Australia)
Laurent Franck (Telecom Bretagne, France)
Balaji Rengarajan (IMDEA, Spain)
Milena Radenkovic (University of Nottingham, UK)
Pasi Sarolahti (Aalto University, Finland)
Pierre-Ugo Tournoux (Reunion Island University, France)
Marcelo Dias de Amorim (LIP6, France)
Vassilios Tsaoussidis (DUTH, Greece)


Important Dates

Paper/Poster Submission Deadline: June 15, 2013, 11.59 PM EDT
Notification Deadline: July 15, 2013
Camera-ready: July 30, 2013
Workshop date: September 30, 2013


Website

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~as2330/lcd/lcdnet-2013.html


--
Arjuna Sathiaseelan | http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~as2330/