Transport protocols and bulk file transfer

[Pascale Primet <>]

Call for Papers

SPECIAL ISSUE OF COMPUTER NETWORKS

HOT TOPICS in TRANSPORT PROTOCOLS FOR VERY FAST AND VERY LONG DISTANCE 
NETWORKS

Introduction

Fast long-distance networks (i.e., networks operating at 1Gbit/s, 2.5 Gbit/s, 
or
10 Gbit/s and spanning several countries or states) are now becoming
commonplace. More and more researchers routinely transfer between 10 GB and
multi-TB datasets over gigabit networks. Application domains for such massive
transfers include data-intensive Grids (e.g., in particle physics, Earth
observation, bio-informatics, and radio astronomy), database mirroring for web
sites (e.g., in e-commerce), and push-based web cache updates.

Although the network infrastructure is now in place, or will soon be, the
transport and application protocols available to date perform rather poorly
over such networks. Standard TCP (TCP Reno) is a reliable transport protocol
that is designed to perform well in traditional networks. However, several
experiments and analyses have shown that this protocol is not suitable for 
each
and every kind of application and environment ? e.g., bulk data transfer in
high bandwidth, large round trip time networks. Current versions of TCP, for
instance, recover very slowly from packet loss when the RTT and the link
capacity are large.

A number of research teams have begun investigating these issues and a set of
new protocols have been proposed and are studied. The International Workshops
series on Protocols for Very Fast Long-Distance Networks (pfldnet) have been
successful in bringing together many researchers from the U.S., Asia and 
Europe
who are working on these problems. In the past three last years, considerable
progress has been made within this field. To capture the essence of the most
challenging problems in a timely manner, this call for papers for special 
issue
of Elseviers Computer Networks in protocols for very long distance and high
capacity networks is proposed.

Original papers are sollicited on topics relevant to the most recent issues 
the
community is faced with. To be accepted for publication, papers should focus 
on
protocol issues in fast long-distance networks and develop one or several of 
the
following hot topics: high speed transport protocols benchmarking and
comparison, test methodologies, experiments on real networks and actual
measurements, high speed transport protocols implementation and hardware 
issues
(computer architectures, network interface cards, offload engines, routers,
switches, etc.), effects of pacing, shaping, burstiness, and forward and
reverse concurrent traffic. We are soliciting papers describing both
theoretical and experimental studies, with special emphasis on accuracy of the
work and the investigation of assumptions that have been neglected in previous
works.
Revised and extended versions of papers already presented at conferences (such
as pfldnet) are welcome.

Instructions on how to submit papers are available at
http://www.ens-lyon.fr/LIP/RESO/COMNET_pfldnet
The suggested length is around 20 pages, formatted as indicated.

Target dates

March 15, 2006: Deadline for paper submissions
April 30, 2006: Notification of acceptance/rejection
June 15, 2006: Submission of final version
Early 2007: Publication of special issue

Editors
------------------------------------------
Pascale Vicat-Blanc Primet
INRIA - Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme
46, allée d'Italie
69007 LYON
FRANCE
Email: 

Phone: +334 72 72 88 02
Fax: +334 72 72 80 80
Web: http://perso.ens-lyon.fr/pascale.primet
---------------------------------------------
Katsushi Kobayashi
Communication Research Laboratory
4-2-1 Nukii-kita. machi,
Koganei Tokyo 184-8795
JAPAN
Email: 



For information on the journal Computer Networks Please visit:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/13891286
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/issn/13891286