SIGCOMM Workshops

SIGCOMM Workshops
Name	SIGCOMM Workshops
Discipline	Computer networking
Sponsor	Association for Computing Machinery
Frequency	Annual / periodic
Established	1990s
Country	International

SIGCOMM Workshops SIGCOMM Workshops are a collection of specialist meetings associated with the Association for Computing Machinery that complement the main SIGCOMM conferences. They gather researchers from institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and University of Cambridge alongside industry participants from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and Cisco Systems to discuss advances in networking, systems, and protocols.

Overview

SIGCOMM Workshops provide focused venues for subfields linked to the broader SIGCOMM community, bringing together attendees from Princeton University, ETH Zurich, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, University of Toronto, and University of Washington as well as national labs like Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Workshops often emphasize interaction between academics from University of Oxford, University College London, Tsinghua University, Peking University, and National University of Singapore and practitioners from companies such as Intel, NVIDIA, Oracle Corporation, IBM, and Qualcomm. They tend to attract authors who have also published at conferences like ACM SIGMETRICS, USENIX, IEEE INFOCOM, NeurIPS, and ICML.

History and Evolution

Early workshops grew alongside the growth of SIGCOMM in the 1990s, influenced by events such as INET, Usenix ATC, Open Networking Summit, and NSDI. Over decades the workshops evolved in topics and format, reflecting trends seen at ACM CHI, ACM SOSP, IEEE S&P, IEEE ICNP, and IEEE/ACM ICCPS. Institutional contributors have included Bell Labs, AT&T Labs Research, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Microsoft Research, and Facebook AI Research. Geographic expansion mirrored major research hubs in Silicon Valley, Cambridge (UK), Shenzhen, Bangalore, and Berlin.

Workshop Topics and Themes

Workshops have covered themes ranging from congestion control and routing—areas central to the work of Vint Cerf and Radia Perlman—to programmable data planes and software-defined networking linked to groups at Barefoot Networks, P4 Language Consortium, and Open Networking Foundation. Typical topics intersect with research at MIT CSAIL, ETH Zurich Systems Group, Broadcom, Juniper Networks, Akamai Technologies, and Cloudflare and borrow methods from communities tied to SIGCOMM, ACM TOCS, IEEE Transactions on Networking, ACM SIGOPS, and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. Emerging themes have included network measurement studied by teams at CAIDA, RIPE NCC, and IETF-aligned researchers; security and privacy discussed by experts at Stanford Computer Security Lab, Berkeley Security Group, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory; and mobile, wireless, and edge computing advanced by researchers from Qualcomm Research, Ericsson Research, Nokia Bell Labs, and Samsung Research.

Organization and Submission Process

Workshops are typically organized by program chairs drawn from universities such as Cornell University, Brown University, Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, and Georgia Institute of Technology, and industry labs including VMware Research and Dropbox Research. Submission processes have adopted peer review practices used at NeurIPS and ICLR, sometimes including open review experiments inspired by OpenReview.net. Accepted formats range from short papers and posters to full papers and demos, with program committees drawing reviewers from SRI International, RIKEN, Max Planck Society, Microsoft Research Cambridge, and Amazon Lab126. Workshop proceedings have appeared in ACM digital collections alongside proceedings from SIGGRAPH, SIGMOD, and SOSP.

Notable Workshops and Series

Prominent recurring workshops have included those on network measurement, delay-tolerant networking linked to initiatives such as DARPA programs and NSF funding efforts, congestion control often tied to work by researchers affiliated with IETF QUIC Working Group, and cloud networking that overlaps with projects at Google Cloud Platform, AWS, and Azure. Other influential series have addressed programmable networks with contributors from Barefoot Networks and Intel Labs, wireless testbeds associated with ORBIT Testbed and COSMOS, and Internet governance discussions featuring participants from ICANN and ISOC.

Impact and Contributions

Workshops have seeded ideas that matured into influential work at venues like SIGCOMM (main conference), IEEE INFOCOM, USENIX Security, ACM e-Energy, and ACM CoNEXT. They have catalyzed open-source projects in repositories maintained by organizations such as Linux Foundation projects, OpenStack Foundation, ONOS Project, and OpenDaylight and have influenced standards development at IETF, IEEE 802, and ITU. Influential technical contributions have linked to technologies developed at Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Google Fiber, Facebook Connectivity, and research groups at Microsoft Research Redmond.

Attendance and Community Engagement

Attendance draws doctoral students from programs at University of California, San Diego, University of Michigan, University of Maryland, College Park, Rice University, and Texas A&M University as well as postdoctoral fellows from Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Janelia Research Campus, and Broad Institute. Community engagement includes panels with editors from Communications of the ACM, IEEE Communications Magazine, and ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review; collaboration sessions involving representatives from Mozilla Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Center for Democracy & Technology, and World Bank-sponsored initiatives; and workshops co-located with larger meetings like ACM SIGCOMM, ACM Internet Measurement Conference and IEEE NetSys. Frequent sponsors and exhibitors have included Keysight Technologies, Arista Networks, F5 Networks, Palo Alto Networks, and Fortinet.

Category:Computer networking conferences