9th IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization
19–23 June 2023 // Madrid, Spain
Boosting Future Networks through Advanced Softwarization

Call For Workshop Papers (closed)

Call For Workshop Papers

IEEE NetSoft 2023 will feature a series of half and full-day workshops. The purpose of the workshops is to complement the conference program with in-depth or integration forums that are dedicated to emerging topics and/or topics specifically related to IEEE NetSoft 2023. Each workshop may include a mix of regular papers, invited presentations, keynotes and panels that encourage the participation of attendees in active discussion.

Important Dates

  • Paper Submission:  March 17, 2023; (Extended) April 2, 2023
  • Notification of Acceptance: April 21, 2023
  • Camera-ready Submission:  April 28, 2023
  • Workshops Date: Either Monday June 19th, 2023 or Friday June 23rd, 2023

Submission Guidelines

Submissions must be written in English. If not otherwise specified, papers should be up to 6 pages, including references and all other material. They must use the standard IEEE two-column conference template, which can be downloaded from www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html. Only original papers not published or submitted for publication elsewhere will be considered for the workshop. Submissions must be in PDF format. Accepted and presented papers will be included in the NetSoft 2023 Proceedings and published on IEEE Xplore.

Workshops

 

S4SI 2023: 6th NETSOFT Workshop on Advances in Slicing for Softwarized Infrastructures towards 6G

Workshop page

https://intrig.dca.fee.unicamp.br/s4si2023/index.html

Aim and Scope

The current industry trend of convergence between computing and networking ecosystems highlights that computing, storage, and connectivity services, as well as any other present and future application instances, will be deployed in the form of virtualized assets within software-defined infrastructures. All of these will be managed and made available under the “as a Service” paradigm. This concept is summarized under the idea of a Slice, which has become a central piece in the evolution of telecom networks. Yet the topic of Slicing is very much fragmented across conceptual views, approaches, technologies, standardization, and so on. 
 
In its sixth edition, the S4SI workshop aims at bringing consolidation around slicing and discussing advances and challenges related to Slicing in Softwarized Infrastructures towards 6G for faster and improved deployment of services in 5G and beyond environments. Furthermore, there is an increasing need for the realization of a compute continuum from IoT-to-Edge-to-Cloud. In this respect, network slicing will be at the forefront in order to support the deployment and operation of new services and applications across IoT devices, edge/core clouds and initial conception of 6G architectures This entails significant challenges for the unified management and orchestration of resources across different network segments (radio, transport, core) together with edge and cloud infrastructures, potentially owned and managed by different operators. Potential intertwining of network slicing mechanisms with ad-hoc clouds and digital twinning raises further research questions, which will be of particular interest for the workshop. 
 
There are clearly many open questions to be addressed, including: 

  • Fragmented landscape and gaps, from concepts to standards towards multi-domain, end-to-end slicing;
  • How do the existing resource technologies of computing, storage and network can seamlessly be managed, orchestrated and controlled as part of end-to-end slices?
  • How end-to-end slices can automatically be defined and allocated on-demand – as a service – to host network services with similar requirements in terms of SLA and QoS;
  • How can cross-slice communication be orchestrated and set up in a secure and optimized manner in order to enable interactions between services deployed in co-located slices? 
  • How to integrate novel approaches that could facilitate the lifecycle management of slices on SDI, like intent-based mechanisms, smart operation based on Artificial Intelligence, etc. 
  • What are the lessons learned from early slicing capabilities deployed for 5G systems, and what are the operational gaps yet open.

S4SI aims at providing an international forum for researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, network operators, and service providers to discuss and address the challenges deriving from the emerging scenarios around Slicing where systems, processes, and workflows used in both computing and communications domains are converging. Altogether, S4SI seeks to improve the common understanding of Slicing, the expected benefits, including the new business model opportunities between slice providers and tenants. A concluding panel will contribute with a rich discussion on the lessons learned and the path ahead towards the consolidation of Slicing. 

Topics of interest

The workshop welcomes contributions from both computing and network-oriented research communities, with the aim of facilitating discussion, cross-fertilization and exchange of ideas and practices, and successfully promotes innovative solutions toward a real use of slices. We are interested in papers (7 pages for Full papers, 4 pages for Short papers, excluding 1 page for references) that cover some of the following topics:

  • Efficient provisioning and operation of Slices
  • Abstractions models and APIs for a Slice
  • Intent-based systems facilitating slicing
  • Architectures for network slicing across the entire 
  • Cross-domain Slicing, federation, interconnection compute continuum
  • Issues in adapting existing systems for Slicing
  • Smart scaling and elasticity on E2E slices 
  • Novel control and data planes for slicing
  • Monitoring and Analytics systems for Slicing
  • High precision slicing with QoS/KPIs guarantees
  • Slicing for 6G
  • Slicing with guarantees for quality, performance, Multi-Domain Management and Orchestration
  • Effective Integration in software-based control, reliability, scalability, high elasticity, resilience safety and security
  • Effective slicing integration in network
  • Service Slicing assurance and fulfilment programmability
  • Energy-efficiency and green operation in slicing
  • Cloud and Network Edge-native slicing
  • Digital twins support of Slicing for cyber
  • AI/ML-assisted Slicing networking
  • Self-management and Zero-configuration network slicing
  • Slicing beyond the 5G Service Based Architecture
  • 6G Slicing needs
  • 6G energy enablers 
  • Network and Service Operation and Resource Management in 6G environments
  • Slicing Intents and Digital twinning applied in 6G

Best papers presented will be invited to submit an extended version for fast-track review in selected journals, e.g., IEEE Communications Magazine Series on Telecom Software, Network Virtualization, and Software Defined Networks. 

Submissions

Authors are invited to submit original contributions (written in English) in PDF format. Only original papers not published or submitted for publication elsewhere will be considered for the workshop. Only PDF files will be accepted for the review process and all manuscripts must be electronically submitted through EDAS: https://edas.info/N30701

Organizing Committee

  • Luis M. Contreras, Telefonica, Spain (General Chair)
  • Alex Galis, University College London, UK
  • Christian Esteve Rothenberg, University of Campinas, Brazil
  • Augusto V. Neto, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil

SecSoft 2023: International workshop on Cyber-Security Threats, Trust and Privacy management in Emerging Software-defined and Virtualized Infrastructures

Workshop page

https://www.secsoft-workshop.org/index.html

Aim and Scope

Evolving business models are progressively reshaping ICT services and infrastructures, with a growing softwarization trend, the massive introduction of virtualization paradigms, and the tight integration with the physical environment. Unfortunately, the evolution of cyber-security paradigms has not followed with the same pace, leading to a substantial gap in solutions capable of protecting the new forms of distributed and heterogeneous systems against an evolving landscape of cyber-threats.

Traditional security tools that organizations have long relied on to protect their networks (i.e., antivirus, intrusion prevention systems, firewalls) are no longer capable of providing sufficient security guarantees against the rapid escalation of advanced persistent threats and multi-vector attacks. The growing complexity of cyber-attacks are urgently demanding more correlation in space and time of (apparently) independent events and logs, and a higher degree of coordination among different security mechanisms.

Topics of interest

This Workshop aims to gather together novel approaches for providing organizations the appropriate situational awareness in relation to cyber security threats allowing them to quickly detect and effectively respond to sophisticated cyber-attacks.

Topics of interest includes but are not limited to:

  • Cyber-security platforms and architectures for digital services; 
  • Security, trust and privacy for industrial systems and the IoT (including smart grids);
  • Monitoring and advanced data collection and analytics;
  • Virtual and software-based cyber-security functions;
  • Orchestration and Automatic Configuration of security functions; 
  • Novel algorithms and models for attack detection and threat identification;
  • Authentication, Authorization and Access control;
  • Intelligent attack mitigation and remediation;
  • Machine learning, big data, network analytics;
  • Secure runtime environments, including trustworthy systems and user devices;
  • Formal methods and policies for security and trust;
  • Trusted computing;
  • Information flow control;
  • Risk analysis and management, Audit and Accountability;
  • Honeypots, forensics and legal investigation tools;
  • Threat intelligence and information sharing;
  • Security techniques and new AAA mechanisms for a multi-tenant infrastructure and services;
  • ORAN security and threats;
  • Programable data planes security, vulnerabilities and threats;
  • Secure storage.

Multi-disciplinary and collaborative research projects are encouraged to submit joint papers describing their integrated architectures and cyber-security platforms, with special emphasis on how they address the challenging cyber-security requirements of softwarized environments and critical infrastructures.

Submission

Interested authors are invited to submit papers according to the following guidelines:

  • Papers must be up to 6 pages long, including tables, figures and references
  • The style to be used is IEEE 2-column US-letter style using IEEE Conference template, and papers must be submitted in pdf format.

Accepted and presented workshop papers will be published in the conference proceedings and will be submitted to IEEE Xplore.
Only PDF files will be accepted for the review process and all manuscripts must be electronically submitted through EDAS: https://edas.info/N30702

Chairs

Workshop Co-Chairs

  • Domenico Siracusa, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy 
  • Antonio Skarmeta, University of Murcia, Spain 
  • Panagiotis Sarigiannidis, University of Western Macedonia, Greece

TPC Co-Chairs

  • Antonio Lioy, Politecnico di Torino, Italy 
  • Marco Rasori, IIT-CNR, Italy 
  • Paola Grosso, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

PVE-SDN 2023: 5th International Workshop On Performance Evaluation of Next Generation Virtualized Environments and Software-Defined Networks

Workshop page

https://sagroups.ieee.org/1916-1/pve-sdn/ieee-pve-sdn-2023/

Aim and Scope

The 5th PVE-SDN workshop aims to explore potential challenges and solutions for the goal of provisioning network performance in next generation virtualized and software-defined network environmentsThe emergence of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) as two pillars of a new networking paradigm has led to design and deployment of elastic content- and service-delivery virtual networks on cloud-based data centers whose backbones consist of software-defined substrate physical networks. This dynamic, multi-layer architecture for network functions introduces new challenges in maintaining performance and quality of service/quality of experience (QoS/QoE) for service providers, and requires new ideas and frameworks in performance measurement and network management. This workshop aims to bring together academic and industry researchers from software-defined ecosystems to identify and discuss technical challenges and state of the art techniques from the perspective of providing and maintaining the expected services, and contemporary results related to performance analysis of SDN and NFV environments.

Topics of interest

  • Performance models, metrics and measurements for virtualized networking environments
  • Performance evaluation/analysis in Edge-to-cloud continuum
  • Performance of AI-enabled SDN
  • Performance of Digital twins
  • Performance evaluation/analysis in Programmable networks
  • NFV in 5G/6G networks
  • Performance of Metaverse
  • Containers, microservice architectures, serverless computing, and edge-to-cloud continuum
  • Network Softwarization for supply chain and e-commerce
  • SD-WAN, technologies for programmable data plane, and resource orchestration
  • Performance models, metrics and measurement for virtualized environments
  • Quality of Service and Quality of Experience in next generation SDN
  • Content distribution in virtualized environments and software-defined networks
  • Resource-aware virtualization and infrastructure as a service
  • Management of software-defined ecosystems
  • High-Precision and Qualitative Communication Services
  • SDN/NFV Performance in Context of 5G
  • Design and assessment of efficient SDN northbound/southbound interfaces
  • Performance of multi-controller SDN deployments
  • Service function chaining performance evaluation
  • Performance of NFV orchestration solutions
  • Analysis of SDN and/or NFV systems
  • SDN/NFV in Context of Blockchains, and FinTech
  • Role of virtualization and software defined environment in enhanced governance and    digital transformation
  • Policy paradigms related to software defined environments

Submissions

Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length papers, with up to six pages for technical content including figures and possible references in IEEE format. All the accepted papers need to be presented at the workshop. They will be included in the workshop proceedings as well as IEEE Xplore. Prospective  authors  are  invited  to  submit  papers  prepared using IEEE 2-column  conference  style (IEEE paper Template) with no more than 6 pages including figures and references. The PDF version of the paper should be submitted through EDAS: https://edas.info/N30699

For more information, please feel free to contact the chair at masadch@ieee.org

WIN 2023: 3rd International Workshop on Intent-based Networking

Workshop page

http://www.adda-association.org/win-2023/

Aim and Scope

Intent Based Networking (IBN) aims at technology-agnostic, fast and robust interaction between network infrastructure management systems and their users, in order to automate and speed up the deployment and lifecycle of applications. IBN as such covers mechanisms to recognize, understand and augment intents defining service or operational requests, so as to ensure their fulfillment, with the support of reliable system feedback enabling their execution within the expected quality limits.

The concept of IBN appeared in the 2010’s with a focus on automated policy configuration. IBN now reaches out to OTT applications deployed on multiple and heterogeneous networks. IBN solutions do not aim at covering all applications and the entire network. Instead, they are deemed to run in a well-defined network scope and associated knowledge domains. That said, IBN solutions need to have enough flexibility to span and exchange with connected domains.

The goal of this workshop is to gather research and experiments from industry, academia, and standards, to get a sense of where we stand, what needs to be addressed and what should be explored. To this end, the workshop will cover IBN aspects of all domains including applications, concepts, lifecycle, challenges, architectures, modeling, instantiation, robustness, etc.

Topics of interest

Topics of interest include and are not limited to: 

  • IBN concepts, architectures, and frameworks
  • IBN enabling techniques: knowledge graphs, natural languages understanding, policy refinement, feedback control loops, smart telemetry, etc.
  • IBN support by machine learning and artificial intelligence
  • IBN applications and use cases, including scenarios combining digital infrastructures and vertical industries
  • IBN proof-of-concepts, experimentations; report on field trials and real-world deployments
  • IBN and digital twins 
  • IBN implementations, tools, and user interface design
  • IBN applications for 5G, beyond-5G and 6G networks
  • IBN and cybersecurity
  • Intent modeling, representation, languages, and intent translation techniques
  • Intent and intent-related information models (policies and services)
  • Intent recognition, recommendation, and abstraction techniques 
  • Intent assurance and assessment
  • Availability, resiliency, performance, trust, and security considerations in IBN

Submissions

Authors are invited to submit complete unpublished papers, which are not under review in any other conference or journal, through the following link: https://edas.info/N30698. To submit a paper, you need to have an EDAS account. Signup to create EDAS account, if need be.

Technical papers must be formatted using the IEEE 2-column format and not exceed 6 pages (without references) for full paper submissions or not exceed 4 pages (without references) for short / demo paper submissions.

Accepted papers will be included in IEEE NetSoft 2023 proceedings and indexed in IEEE Xplore library.

Only PDF files are accepted. Submissions not meeting the above guidelines will be rejected without other consideration. The camera-ready version of accepted papers will have to follow the guidelines for publication in IEEE Xplore. 

Authors of accepted papers must present their papers at the conference. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register and present the paper.

Organizing Committee

General co-chairs

  • Sabine Randriamasy, Nokia, France.
  • Luis Contreras, Telefonica, Spain.

TPC co-chairs

  • Eric Renault, ESIEE Paris, France.
  • Molka Gharbaoui, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy.
  • Marc Bruyère, Institute of Innovation Research Lab, Japan.

Industry track co-chairs

  • Laurent Ciavaglia, Nokia, France 
  • Danny Lachos, Benocs, Germany

Publicity co-chairs

  • Barbara Martini, Universitas Mercatorum, Italy
  • Marc Bruyère, Internet Initiative Japan Lab, Japan, Japan
  • Pedro Henrique Gomes, Ericsson, Brazil

Publication chair

  • Molka Gharbaoui, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy.

Web chair

  • Eric Renault, ESIEE Paris, France.
     

ENS 2023: 2nd International Workshop on Edge Network Softwarization

Workshop page

https://sites.google.com/view/ens2023/home

Aim and Scope

The 2nd International Workshop on Edge Network Softwarization (ENS 2023) will be co-hosted at the 9th IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft 2023) that will be held from June 19th to June 23rd, 2023 in Madrid, Spain.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) along with Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are playing a fundamental role in the softwarization of the network infrastructure. In particular, both technologies have revolutionised the way network functions and services are offered, which are often (partially) pushed towards the edge for enhanced performance, improved privacy, better agility and significant cost reduction.

Accordingly, this workshop aims at providing an overview of the softwarization process that has started occurring in recent years and is involving the network edge, with focus on future-proof approaches that will be part of the advanced 5G&B and 6G network solutions.

Edge network softwarization is a fundamental topic that has to be thoroughly investigated and pushed by the research community. ENS 2023 has the goal to meet together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry that are actively involved in network edge softwarization related research projects.

Topics of interest

The topics of interest for ENS 2023 include, but are not limited to:

  • SDN and NFV distributed solutions for the network edge;
  • 5G network softwarization and beyond;
  • Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) solutions for network edge (e.g. orchestration strategies, uCPE monitoring, traffic engineering);
  • Service and network orchestration at the edge;
  • Novel solutions for data-plane programmable (e.g. P4, eBPF, XDP) edge devices;
  • Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the edge;
  • Serverless computing and Function-as-a-Service in edge network architectures;
  • Network-aware resource provisioning in Fog Computing;
  • Inter-data center networking;
  • Advances to end-to-end tunneling technologies (e.g. VxLAN, IPSEC/GRE);
  • Edge computing energy efficiency and resource optimisation;
  • Support for low latency applications at the edge (e.g. Tactile Internet);
  • Edge-driven use cases (e.g. Agriculture 4.0, Industry 4.0, etc.);
  • Privacy and security for the network edge (e.g. zero trust networks);
  • Multi-tenancy of edge networks;
  • Network edge availability and protection;
  • Open Hardware and Software solutions;
  • Converged optical and wireless architectures at the edge.

Submissions

Authors are invited to submit original contributions for presentation at the workshop. All submissions must be written in English. Papers should be up to 6 pages, including references
and all other material. They must use the standard IEEE two-column conference template, which can be downloaded from www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html.
Accepted and presented papers will be included in the NetSoft 2023 Proceedings and published on IEEE Xplore.

Only PDF files will be accepted for the review process and all manuscripts must be electronically submitted through EDAS: https://edas.info/N30678

Workshop Organizers

  • Sebastian Troia, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
  • Christian Grasso, University of Catania, Italy
  • Marco Savi, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
  • Alessio Sacco, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
  • Frank Slyne, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
  • Michael Seufert, University of Würzburg, Germany
  • Victoria Manfredi, Wesleyan University, USA
  • Koteswararao Kondepu, Indian Institute of Technology Dharwad, India
  • Sajad Khorsandroo, North Carolina A&T State University, USA
  • Nabeel Akhtar, Akamai Technologies Inc, Cambridge, USA
  • Elisa Rojas, University of Alcalá, Spain
  • Ryota Kawashima, Nagoya Institute Technology, Japan
  • Lihua Ruan, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China 

NetData: International Workshop on Network Automation and Data Plane programmability

Workshop page

https://sites.google.com/view/netsoft23-netdata/

Aim and Scope

Cloud native solutions have revolutionized the way network applications are developed and deployed over cloud computing infrastructure. With the increasing availability of edge computing sites, and the evolving traffic trends (e.g., due to the increasing machine-type communications), it is reasonable to expect that over the next years we will experience an increase in investment on the development of highly distributed cloud-native applications, solutions, and cloud-native-first infrastructure.
With Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) blurring the lines between infrastructure and software, telecom research and industry can leverage cloud-native solutions to improve, among other properties, scalability, reliability, flexibility. In fact, some industries already started exploring the possibilities that cloud-native solutions can bring to their telecom-related products.
The digitization of network operations can help to reduce operational costs and improve service agility. Optical fibre infrastructure continuing to expand, becoming nearly ubiquitous. Smart society infrastructures can improve services for all while reducing their cost. Overcoming the green challenge is critically important for the planet and the sustainability of the network. At the same time, the business environment continues to change, and this can have major impacts on the network. To enable autonomous network management, techniques such as intent-based management, knowledge graph for fault management, and network information gathering can be used. Network-based sensing systems include fibre cable digitization, distributed optical fibre sensing, and Wi-Fi sensing.

Topics of interest

The workshop welcomes contributions from network-oriented research communities, with the aim of facilitating discussion, and exchange of ideas and practices, and successfully promotes innovative solutions towards network automation. Submitted papers may cover any of the following topics:

  • Control and management of data plane programmable devices.
  • SDN and NFV distributed solutions.
  • Novel solutions for data-plane programmable (e.g., P4, eBPF) devices and Smart NICs.
  • Inter-data center networking.
  • Programmable converged optical and wireless architectures.
  • Network automation enabling techniques (e.g., policy refinement, control loops, artificial intelligence methods).
  • Availability, resiliency, performance, trust, and security considerations in network automation and data plane programmability.
  • Network automation and data plane programmability standards and open-source software.
  • Network automation or data plane evolution proof-of-concepts, experimentations; report on field trials and real-world deployments.

Submission

Prospective authors are invited to submit high-quality original technical papers for presentation at the workshop and publication in the NetSoft 2023 Workshops Proceedings.

All submissions must be written in English and must use standard IEEE two-column conference template that can be downloaded from https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html

Papers can be up to 6 pages, including references and all other material. Papers submitted should describe original, previously unpublished research results, not currently under review by another conference or journal. Papers not meeting the length and formatting requirements or violating IEEE’s guidelines on plagiarized content will be rejected without review.

Only PDF files will be accepted for the review process and all manuscripts must be electronically submitted through EDAS: https://edas.info/N30700

Organizing Committee

  • Ricard Vilalta, CTTC, General Chair
  • Carlos Natalino da Silva, Chalmers University of Technology, General Chair
  • Dan Marom, Hebrew University, Israel, TPC Co-Chair
  • Haomian Zheng, Huawei, TPC Co-Chair
  • Konstantinos Tsiomos, Nova, TPC Co-Chair
  • Juan Pedro Fernández-Palacios, Telefónica, TPC Co-Chair

Patrons