More than 10 years have now elapsed since the beginning of Software-Defined Networking (SDN). Over the course of a decade, SDN has fueled incredible innovation, revolutionizing virtually all networking areas. SDN is now deployed in a growing number of production and experimental settings, including data centers, enterprise networks, content providers, and Internet Service Providers.

At its core, SDN is all about making programming networks as easy as programming computers. Through programming interfaces and programmable substrates, SDN enables specifying and provisioning network-wide forwarding behaviors, as well as adapting how the network hardware itself forwards traffic. SDN has enabled more flexible and predictable network control, made it easier to extend the network with new functionality, and made it possible to verify the correctness of networking behaviors.

The ACM SIGCOMM Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR) is the premiere venue for research publications on SDN, building on past years' successful SOSR and HotSDN (Hot Topics in Software Defined Networking) workshops. New to this year, SOSR will be co-­located with the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit on March 3, 2020 in San Jose, CA.to foster interaction between academic and industrial attendees.

We invite researchers and practitioners to submit both long and short previously unpublished papers, choosing the length appropriate to the level of completeness and detail in the work. We particularly encourage position papers, radical ideas, and papers on real applications and experiences of SDN.

We invite submissions on a wide range of research on the broad area of software-defined, programmable networks, including, but not limited to:

    Software-defined, programmable control plane applications
        Network scenarios of home, wireless, cellular, enterprise, backbone, Internet-of-Things, and content distribution networks
        Different general networking tasks including management, monitoring, security, and privacy, etc
        Virtualized network functions (e.g., firewalls, intrusion detection systems, load balancers)
        Network Virtualization
    Software-defined, programmable data plane applications
        Programmable switches, SmartNICs, FPGAs, kernel or network stack bypass, and other network hardware accelerators
        In-network compute or storage to accelerate networking workloads or application demands (e.g. P4-based solutions, hybrid compute/networking ecosystems, etc)
        Novel network architectures and building blocks (e.g., programmable topologies, bandwidth variable links, optical networks)
        White-box and bare-metal switching
    Foundations of programmable network deployments and related applications
        Programming languages, compilers, verification and testing techniques in SDN
        The design and application of useful SDN tools
        Novel techniques for improving the security, reliability, performance, and scalability of SDN architectures
    Applications of SDN in home, wireless, cellular, enterprise, datacenter, backbone, Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing, and content distribution networks
    Applications of SDN to networks and co-deployed technologies (e.g. Cyber-Physical Systems, transportation or autonomous technologies, smart cities/buildings, or physical sensors such as video cameras and environmental sensors)
    Applications of SDN to content-centric networking, computational workflows, etc.
    Applications of SDN at the physical layer
    Incremental deployment of SDN into operational networks along with experiences deploying SDN technology and applications in operational networks
    Integration of SDN into open-source compute ecosystems

In addition to traditional research papers, we also seek papers that present:

    Surveys of important SDN concepts, techniques, and standards
    Technical overviews of larger research projects, production systems, and use cases
    Open-source benchmark suites or measurement data for evaluating SDN systems

New This Year: Experience and Challenge Submissions

In addition to traditional research papers, this year the SOSR Organizing Committee is excited to announce the solicitation of Experience and Challenge papers. Given SDN has been successfully deployed in a variety of production environments, “Experience” papers detailing, evaluating, or providing a retrospective of the practical impacts of SDN deployments will be of great use to the scientific community. And while SDN technologies are currently deployed in production environments, the promise of software-driven networking remains large. As such, “Challenge” papers outlining the next steps, challenges, or radical ideas for software-driven networking and systems will also be requested. Both long and short Challenge and Experience papers are invited.

Submission Instructions

Submissions must be original, unpublished work, and not under consideration at another conference or journal. Each submission must be a single PDF file in two ­columns, 10­ point format following the sigconf format of the 2017 ACM Master Article LaTeX Template Use the sample latex file sample-sigconf.tex. Submitted short papers should be no longer than six (6) pages, and long papers no longer than twelve (12) pages, including all material except references. SOSR '20 is double-blind, meaning that authors should make a good faith effort to anonymize papers. Papers should be submitted electronically via the submission site.

Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library. We stress that the publication of short papers at SOSR does not preclude the later publication of a full-­length version of the paper at a conference or in a journal. Authors of accepted papers are expected to present their papers at the symposium and will have the opportunity to present a poster/demo at an interactive session, co-­located with OCP.

Please direct any submission-related questions to sosr2020tpc@gmail.com.