IEEE International Workshop on Manageability and Security of Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Network (MASONS)
With ICCCN 2015 at Las Vegas, Aug 3 – 6, 2015
http://www.manageability-at-scale.org/cfp/icccn-masons.html

MASONS 2015 is Technically Co-Sponsored by the IEEE Communication Society

1. Theme

Today, many research organizations in academia, government labs and industry are exploring SDN and NFV technologies to study and materialize their benefits in real world networks. These benefits are enabling automation, reducing time to market in case of new service introductions, optimization and/or improving overall economics of network and system management and operations. However to materialize the benefits of SDN and NFV at larger scale across multiple domains, similar to today’s internet, additional investigations are needed which should focus beyond the core SDN, NFV features and functionalities. This involves: development of multi-domain SDN network to support Internet; large scale deployment of novel applications, identification of technological and operational gaps in research and development over the longer term to increase the capability of SDN and NFV powered networks, and better integrate them with existing public Internet and emerging cloud technologies; Identification of security, manageability gaps, including opportunities to build in additional levels of security, resilience and management capabilities.

2. Topics of interest

This workshop aims to show case and disseminate new ideas and high quality research on manageability and security of Software Defined Network and Network Function Virtualization. We solicit original research articles, review papers, theoretical studies, and practical software systems incorporating new paradigms, experimental prototypes, and insightful requirement analysis with the above theme including, but not limited to the topics below:
* Design, requirements and prototypes of Software Defined Exchanges (SDX) to enable interoperability and use of new approaches with the current Internet infrastructure.
* Security, privacy, authentication, trust, verification for SDN and NFV.
* Integration of compute, storage and network under the Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) paradigm.
* Analysis of new management challenges that SDN and NFV has introduced.
* Network management practices and business processes for SDN and NFV, in service provider and data center infrastructures.
* Tools and operational procedures for managing SDN.
* New paradigms in network operations, administration and management (OAM), service orchestration, service engineering, converged network-compute and data center management.
* Software Defined Network (SDN), abstraction, programmability, application Interface, south and northbound API.
* Network Function Virtualization (NFV), distributed control, virtual switches, routing virtualization.
* Network system management, orchestration, resource management and optimization, integration, interoperability.
* Network operations management related automation, troubleshooting and management tools.
* Cloud based network and system management application paradigms.
* Application of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), analytics and big data in network and system management.
* Insights about Network Management System architectural requirements analysis.
* Scalability of SDN, NFV, SDI, NMS systems.
* User experience, user interface design issues and challenges in NMS for SDN, NFV, ethnographic studies on network operations centers, usability studies of management applications.

3. Instructions for IEEE MASONS 2015 Workshop Authors:

Submitted manuscripts must be formatted in standard IEEE camera ready format (double column, 10 pt font) and must be submitted via EasyChair (http://www.easychair.org/) as PDF files (formatted for 8.5×11 inch paper). It should be no longer than 6 pages with up to two extra pages given the authors are willing to pay an over-length charge per extra page. The detailed information can be found in the ICCCN 2015 (Las Vegas) website. For any workshop related questions or additional information please contact the General, TPC, or Workshop Chairs.

Submitted papers should not be previously published in or be under consideration for publication in another conference or journal. Paper titles and/or author names cannot be changed and/or added to the papers once papers are submitted to ICCCN 2015 for review. Submissions must include a title, abstract, keywords, author(s) and affiliation(s) with postal and email address(es) and phone number(s). A paper abstract must be registered on EasyChair by the deadline indicated below.

4. Speakers, Panelists

* Morning keynote on manageability: Dr. Gee Rittenhouse , Sr. VP, Cloud and Virtualization Group, Cisco Systems
* Morning keynote on security: Phillip Porras , Program Director - Internet Security Group, SRI International
* Panelists:
- Inder Monga (Moderator), CTO, ESNet
- Josh Bailey, Google
- eepak Bansal, Manager, Microsoft
- Douglas Freimuth, STSM - Master Inventor, IBM Research
- Dr. Ashutosh Dutta, Lead Member of Technical Staff - Mobility & Cloud Security, AT&T

5. Important dates:

* Abstract Due: Apr 15, 2015 (Extended)
* Paper Due: Apr 15, 2015 (Extended)
* Acceptance Notification: Apr 30, 2015
* Camera Ready Due: May 8, 2015

6. Review and Publication of Manuscripts:

Submitted papers will be reviewed by the ICCCN 2015 TPC members and judged on originality, technical correctness, relevance, and quality of presentation. An accepted paper must be presented at the conference venue by one (who registered/paid full author reg. fee) of authors to be included in the conference venue. Each full registration covers up to two ICCCN 2015 conference papers authored by the registered/paid author. Accepted and presented papers will be published in the conference proceedings and submitted to IEEE Xplore as well as other Abstracting and Indexing (A&I) databases. The page limit for papers is 6 pages. Papers should be submitted on EDAS, the link for this workshop will be published here shortly.

Papers of special merit will be selected for possible fast track at a journal special issue at IJCNDS (see details at http://www.inderscience.com/info/ingeneral/cfplist.php?jcode=ijcnds and http://www.manageability-at-scale.org/cfp/).

7. Workshop chairs
* Inder Monga, ESnet and LBNL, USA, imonga@es.net
* Amitava Biswas, Cisco Systems, USA, amitavabiswas@ieee.org
* Chen Liu, Microsoft, USA, chenliu419@gmail.com

8. Technical Program Committee
* Christian Rothenberg, University of Campinas, Brasil
* Gerhard Hasslinger, T-Systems ENPS Darmstadt
* Israat Haque, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
* Josh Bailey, Google, USA
* Kenichi Ogaki, KDDI Corporation, Japan
* Laurent Lefevre, INRIA
* Lefteris Mamatas, University of Macedonia, Greece
* Lisandro Granville, Institute of Informatcis of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil
* Michael Menth, University of Tübingen, Germany
* Rajat Mehrotra, Desert Research Institute, Reno, NV, USA
* Rajdeep Bhowmik, Cisco, USA
* Roberto Bruschi, DIST - University of Genoa
* Satya Mohanty, Cisco, USA
* Spyros Denazis, University of Patras, Greece
* Steven Latre, University of Antwerp, Belgium
* Xenofontas Dimitropoulos, University of Crete and FORTH
* Walter Cerroni, DEI - University of Bologna