Call for Papers SPECIAL ISSUE OF COMPUTER NETWORKS HOT TOPICS in TRANSPORT PROTOCOLS FOR VERY FAST AND VERY LONG DISTANCE NETWORKS Introduction Fast long-distance networks (i.e., networks operating at 1Gbit/s, 2.5 Gbit/s, or 10 Gbit/s and spanning several countries or states) are now becoming commonplace. More and more researchers routinely transfer between 10 GB and multi-TB datasets over gigabit networks. Application domains for such massive transfers include data-intensive Grids (e.g., in particle physics, Earth observation, bio-informatics, and radio astronomy), database mirroring for web sites (e.g., in e-commerce), and push-based web cache updates. Although the network infrastructure is now in place, or will soon be, the transport and application protocols available to date perform rather poorly over such networks. Standard TCP (TCP Reno) is a reliable transport protocol that is designed to perform well in traditional networks. However, several experiments and analyses have shown that this protocol is not suitable for each and every kind of application and environment ? e.g., bulk data transfer in high bandwidth, large round trip time networks. Current versions of TCP, for instance, recover very slowly from packet loss when the RTT and the link capacity are large. A number of research teams have begun investigating these issues and a set of new protocols have been proposed and are studied. The International Workshops series on Protocols for Very Fast Long-Distance Networks (pfldnet) have been successful in bringing together many researchers from the U.S., Asia and Europe who are working on these problems. In the past three last years, considerable progress has been made within this field. To capture the essence of the most challenging problems in a timely manner, this call for papers for special issue of Elseviers Computer Networks in protocols for very long distance and high capacity networks is proposed. Original papers are sollicited on topics relevant to the most recent issues the community is faced with. To be accepted for publication, papers should focus on protocol issues in fast long-distance networks and develop one or several of the following hot topics: high speed transport protocols benchmarking and comparison, test methodologies, experiments on real networks and actual measurements, high speed transport protocols implementation and hardware issues (computer architectures, network interface cards, offload engines, routers, switches, etc.), effects of pacing, shaping, burstiness, and forward and reverse concurrent traffic. We are soliciting papers describing both theoretical and experimental studies, with special emphasis on accuracy of the work and the investigation of assumptions that have been neglected in previous works. Revised and extended versions of papers already presented at conferences (such as pfldnet) are welcome. Instructions on how to submit papers are available at http://www.ens-lyon.fr/LIP/RESO/COMNET_pfldnet The suggested length is around 20 pages, formatted as indicated. Target dates March 15, 2006: Deadline for paper submissions April 30, 2006: Notification of acceptance/rejection June 15, 2006: Submission of final version Early 2007: Publication of special issue Editors ------------------------------------------ Pascale Vicat-Blanc Primet INRIA - Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme 46, allée d'Italie 69007 LYON FRANCE Email: Pascale.Primet@inria.fr Phone: +334 72 72 88 02 Fax: +334 72 72 80 80 Web: http://perso.ens-lyon.fr/pascale.primet --------------------------------------------- Katsushi Kobayashi Communication Research Laboratory 4-2-1 Nukii-kita. machi, Koganei Tokyo 184-8795 JAPAN Email: ikob@koganei.wide.ad.jp For information on the journal Computer Networks Please visit: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/13891286 http://www.elsevier.com/locate/issn/13891286