See http://www.comsoc.org/socstr/techcom/ntwrk/special.html

                       Call For Papers 
                IEEE Network Magazine

 Special Issue on Control of Best Effort Traffic

Guest Editor:

Christophe Diot 
Sprint ATL 
1 Adrian Court  
Burlingame, CA 94030, USA 
E.mail: cdiot@sprintlabs.com 
Phone: +1-650-375-4530 

Jean-Yves Le Boudec 
EPFL  
INN(Ecublens)  
CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland  
E.mail: leboudec@epfl.ch 
Phone: +41-21-693-6631 


Scope:

The internet is based almost exclusively on the concept of best effort, or elastic traffic.
Users can attempt to send as much as they want, but they are expected to be
network-friendly, namely, every user flow should be limited by congestion control
functions implemented in TCP or in UDP applications that should be "TCP friendly".

Network support to control best effort traffic may be totally absent (drop tail routers). In
that case, hosts are expected to understand packet losses as negative feedback. A more
sophisticated method is to use some form of active queue management. Current Active
Queue Management mechanisms rely on flow agregation at a router interface to
provide some kind of quality control, assuming hosts react on a per flow basis. On the
extreme end of the spectrum are per-flow queuing techniques which provide complete
isolation to flows; they have until recently be considered too complex to implement in a
network node. In another dimension, network nodes may send explicit feedback to
hosts, by marking packets instead of dropping them.

The intention of this special issue is to provide a clear understanding of the
network-wide capabilities of the different mechanisms used to provide end-to-end
traffic. We seek articles of two kinds: (1) tutorials that survey and contrast
state-of-the-art and (2) papers that describe systems or implementations with
important insights. Topics of interest include:

     Active queue management, RED 
     TCP friendliness 
     Providing Classes of Best Effort Services 
     Global Network Effects 
     Policing and misbehaving user 

Submission:

The guest editors request potential authors to send an email to guest editors
(leboudec@epfl.ch and cdiot@sprintlabs.com), giving a URL where a postscript or PDF
version of their submission can be downloaded. All feature articles will then undergo a
technical peer review consistent with other archival publications.
Note: Authors may wish to consult the sections on author information and guidelines for
reviewers, which are given at
http://www.comsoc.org/socstr/techcom/ntwrk/authors.html

Schedule: 

     Submission Deadline:  September 15, 2000 
     Acceptance Notification: December 15, 2000 
     Final Manuscripts Due:  February 1, 2000 
     Publication of  Special Issue: May/June 2001