IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications
2-5 May 2022 // Virtual Conference

Chairs' Messages

Message from the General Chair 

  
         Shiwen Mao
IEEE INFOCOM 2022 General Chair
 
Howdy, fellow researchers! On behalf of the organization committee, it is my great pleasure to welcome you to IEEE INFOCOM 2022, the 41st edition of the IEEE Conference on Computer Communications. Due to the COVID pandemic, INFOCOM 2022 is being offered as a virtual conference. We have created a rich technical program consisting of 56 technical paper sessions, 11 workshops, a poster and demo program, as well as, a keynote speech, a panel, and an interview with the INFOCOM achievement award winner. Despite the pandemic, INFOCOM 2022 continues the tradition of the conference to feature a high-quality technical program across a wide range of research areas, as well as to offer an excellent experience for all attendees.
 

As the largest and most influential conference on all aspects of computer communications and networks, INFOCOM has always been at center stage, showcasing innovative and cutting-edge research in the field. Its 41-year history has witnessed the proliferation of the networking field, from its nascent stage to today’s vibrant and broad research areas, with a deep influence on every aspect of our daily lives. Many groundbreaking works have been published in INFOCOM with overarching impacts within and outside the field, as exemplified by the INFOCOM Test-of-Time award papers. In addition, INFOCOM has also been instrumental to foster the formation and growth of the networking community. Back in graduate school, many of us shared the experience of sleepless nights reading INFOCOM papers, trying to find a worthwhile problem for our dissertation work. Later on, we got more involved in the conference in various roles, such as reviewer, author, student volunteer, attendee, and TPC or organizing committee member. Our career paths also coincide with, and benefit tremendously from, the conference, which has always been a most valuable venue for the networking community.

INFOCOM, at its 41st anniversary, remains to be a vibrant conference since it never stops incorporating new ideas for continued improvement. Feedback is always solicited at each TPC meeting, and through and after the conference. Notable examples of such innovations include the triple-blind review process and the fully automated review assignment for rigorous and fair reviews, the Distinguished TPC Member awards to reward high-quality reviewers, the addition of the 10th page solely for references to improve literature review, and the Best-in-Session awards to reward best presentations. Most recently at INFOCOM 2022, authors of accepted papers are encouraged to share their related code and/or data as a service to the research community. If you have any ideas for improvement, please do not hesitate to reach out to the steering committee.

The excellent four-day program would not be possible without the hard work of many people behind the scenes. I would like to thank the Steering Committee, chaired by Dr. Guoliang Xue, and the Executive Chair, Dr. Tom Hou, for their trust, support, and guidance throughout this journey. I am also grateful to the TPC Chairs, Drs. Yingying Jennifer Chen, Atilla Eryilmaz, and Jeorg Widmer, the TPC Vice Chair for Information Systems (EDAS), Dr. Yan Wang, the Workshop Chairs, Drs. Dejun (DJ) Yang and Lu Su, the Panel Chair, Dr. Xinyu Zhang, and the Demo/Poster Chairs, Drs. Bo Ji and Huacheng Zeng, for producing such an exceptional technical program. I would also like to thank the other members of the Organizing Committee for their dedication and efforts, including the Student Conference Grant Chair, Dr. Xiaowen Gong, the Publication Chairs, Drs. Yan Wang and Lu Su, the Publicity Chairs, Drs. Ruidong Li, Mingyue Ji, and Zheng Chang, my Sponsorship Co-Chair, Dr. Tom Hou, and the Web Chairs, Drs. Ruozhou Yu and Xu Yuan. 

Special thanks go to Dr. Baochun Li for the fully automated review system, and to Drs. Baochun Li and Ben Liang for sharing their extensive experience, as well as the 32 student volunteers, to make the online conference a success. We thank Mr. Jimmy Le for his continued support of the conference from the ComSoc side. We also deeply appreciate the generous funds from the ComSoc for student travel grants, which support attendance for 116 students, and from the Platinum Patron, The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), Abu Dhabi, UAE. Please visit their virtual booth during the coffee breaks.

Last but not least, we thank all the authors, speakers, reviewers, TPC members, and attendees. Together we will make INFOCOM 2022 a great success! Enjoy the conference, and hope you take home recognition from your peers, new ideas, new friendship, and new collaboration opportunities.

Shiwen Mao
General Chair, IEEE INFOCOM 2022

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Message from the TPC Chairs
 
           Yingying Chen                   Atilla Eryilmaz                  Joerg Widmer
IEEE INFOCOM 2022 TPC Co-Chairs
 
          Yan Wang
IEEE INFOCOM 2022 TPC Vice-Chair for Information Systems

 

On behalf of the Technical Program Committee (TPC), it is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 41st IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2022).

With the prolonged fight against COVID-19, IEEE INFOCOM 2022 is held online. This year, INFOCOM has maintained its high standard and features a broad spectrum of papers on a variety of forward-looking research areas in computer communications and networking. In total, we received 1129 valid paper submissions from 35 countries/regions. The entire review process involved 412 technical program committee members and 45 area chairs from various research domains and geographical areas encompassing academic, industrial, government, and research organizations. A total of 4,380 reviews were collected, with 100% of the papers receiving at least 3 reviews. After a rigorous review process, including paper reviews, an online discussion, and an online TPC meeting, 224 papers were selected for presentation in the main technical program. We are proud to feature the selected papers representing the forefront of computer communications and networking research as they explore important directions and innovative solutions in these fields.

All submitted papers were reviewed by a three-phase, triple-blind process that INFOCOM has implemented since 2015. The author identity, reviewer identity, and area chair identity were hidden during the review process. The review process consisted of three major phases implemented with the joint effort of regular and advisory TPC members, area chairs, and TPC chairs. First, each paper was assigned to four regular TPC members. Area chairs and TPC chairs closely monitored the process and added additional reviewers from the advisory TPC members whenever necessary to ensure that at least three independent, high-quality reviews were obtained for each paper. Second, the papers were discussed online by their reviewers, and a meta-review was written for each paper to summarize the discussion. Third, based on the meta-reviews and area chairs’ recommendations, 91 “clear accept” papers were accepted without further discussion, and another 323 papers were selected for discussion at an online TPC meeting. The online TPC meeting was held on November 13, 2021. At the TPC meeting, an additional 134 papers were accepted out of the 323. We thank all the area chairs, TPC members, and external reviewers for their tireless work. Their dedicated effort and the high quality of their reviews allowed us to put together this strong technical program.

The assignment of 1,129 papers and 4,380 reviews to 45 area chairs and 412 TPC members was a great challenge. We are grateful to Dr. Baochun Li for his continued support of INFOCOM, providing an automated system for accomplishing many daunting tasks related to paper grouping by areas, area chair assignment, reviewer assignment, and TPC meeting discussion group assignment, among others. The system analyzes TPC members’ representative papers along with the submitted papers to compute pair-wise similarity scores between TPC members’ expertise and submitted papers. The matrix of similarity scores is used as input to a linear program solver to find an optimal solution to the above tasks. An advantage of this automation is that the produced assignment is highly objective and effective, resulting in higher reviewer expertise matching and high-quality reviews.

A two-round Best Paper Award selection process was also conducted to determine the best papers. In the first round, the INFOCOM 2022 TPC Chairs went over all the nominations and selected 15 candidate papers. In the second round, an independent committee carefully reviewed these candidate papers. To eliminate possible prior bias, committee members were not given access to the original reviews of the candidate papers. We would like to convey our appreciation to members of the committee, Professors Shiwen Mao, Chair (Auburn University, USA), Falko Dressler (Paderborn University, Germany), Eylem Ekici (Ohio State University, USA), Jiangchuan Liu (Simon Fraser University, Canada), Mehmet Can Vuran (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA), Tilman Wolf (University of Massachusetts, USA), Yanchao Zhang (Arizona State University, USA), and Larry Xue (Arizona State University, USA), for their dedicated and meticulous work in the award selection process.

In addition, this year we introduced a new procedure to recognize papers that do provide implementation code and/or data to foster verification and repeatability. The availability of the artifacts was verified by the TPC chairs, and qualifying papers were tagged with “[Code/Data Available]” in the list of accepted papers on the INFOCOM website.

We also continued the effort of acknowledging excellent reviewers through the reviewer peer-review process. For each paper, the reviewers were asked to rate the reviews written by other reviewers during the online discussion phase and at the online TPC meeting. Based on the peer-review results and the TPC members’ promptness in meeting all the deadlines, we recognized 100 TPC members as “Distinguished Members of the IEEE INFOCOM 2022 Technical Program Committee.” Each distinguished TPC member has received a certificate from the conference and is highlighted with a star on the conference website.

The 224 papers in the program have been organized into 56 technical sessions with themes ranging from network protocols to edge computing, from resource management to networked vehicular systems, and from age-defying topics such as privacy and security to emerging themes such as federated learning and 6G. In addition to technical sessions, the IEEE INFOCOM 2022 program features a plenary keynote, a panel, four poster sessions and four demo sessions, as well as a special session for a reflection with the INFOCOM Achievement Award winner. The conference starts off with 8 full-day and 3 half-day workshops dedicated to emerging topics in the field.

For a conference of the size of INFOCOM, a high-quality technical program would not be possible without countless hours of hard work by members of the research community. Again, we want to thank all area chairs, TPC members, and external reviewers for their outstanding and hard work. We would also like to thank the conference Executive Chair, Tom Hou (Virginia Tech, USA), General Chair, Shiwen Mao (Auburn University, USA), the Steering Committee Chair, Larry Xue (Arizona State University, USA), and the whole Steering Committee for their continued leadership, support, and guidance. We extend our special thanks to Baochun Li (University of Toronto, Canada), who designed, maintained, and continued to improve the automated paper assignment system and the global ranking system, which contributed significantly to the quality of the final program. We would like to thank the Online Conference Chair, Ben Liang (University of Toronto, Canada); the Workshop Chairs, Dejun (DJ) Yang (Colorado School of Mines, USA) and Lu Su (Purdue University, USA); Panel Chair, Xinyu Zhang (UCSD, USA); the Demo/Posters Chairs, Bo Ji (Virginia Tech, USA) and Huacheng Zeng (Michigan State University, USA); the Student Conference Grant Chair, Xiaowen Gong (Auburn University, USA); the Publication Chairs, Yan Wang (Temple University, USA) and Lu Su (Purdue University, USA); the Publicity Chairs, Ruidong Li (Kanazawa University, Japan), Mingyue Ji (University of Utah, USA) and Zheng Chang (University of Jyväskylä, Finland); the Sponsorship Chairs, Shiwen Mao (Auburn University, USA) and Tom Hou (Virginia Tech, USA); the Web Chairs, Ruozhou Yu (NC State University, USA) and Xu Yuan (University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA). Without their efforts, INFOCOM 2022 would not be possible.

Our warmest thanks also go to Jimmy Le, IEEE Communications Society, for his invaluable assistance in coordinating various IEEE-related activities and taking care of registration and many other aspects of conference logistics.

Finally, we would like to thank all the authors, speakers, and attendees for their continued support by submitting original contributions to this conference and attending the conference. It is your contribution and collaborative effort that make INFOCOM a continued success!

We look forward to meeting you online for IEEE INFOCOM 2022 and hope you enjoy the technical program. We cordially invite your contribution to and participation in upcoming INFOCOM conferences.

 

Yingying Chen, Atilla Eryilmaz, Joerg Widmer
IEEE INFOCOM 2022 TPC Chairs
 
Yan Wang
IEEE INFOCOM 2022 TPC Vice-Chair for Information Systems

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Student Conference Grant Sponsors