The IEEE 17th International Conference on High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR 2016) was held at Keio University, Yokohama, Japan, on 14-17 June, 2016. Yokohama is a major port city to the south of Tokyo. The conference was sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society and the IEICE Communications Society, and was co-located with 12th International Conference on IP+Optical Network (iPOP). The conference was supported by the IEICE Photonic Network Technical Committee, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan, the Support Center for the Advanced Telecommunications Technology Research Foundation, Japan, and the Yokohama Convention & Visitors Bureau, Japan.
HPSR addresses numerous challenges of today’s data networks, which are being subjected to significant changes driven by cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and other new concepts. As a result, new technologies are needed to efficiently and effectively cope with the resulting traffic demands. This conference brought together researchers from around the world to present the latest advances in the fields of high-performance switching and routing. The participants discussed switching and routing capabilities that ought to be more intelligent, efficient, and reliable than ever before.
The conference program included a rich technical program comprising 31 excellent technical full-paper presentations and eight poster-paper presentations, three keynote speeches, one invited speech, four tutorials, technical tours, and workshop presentations. The number of participants was 101 (including 69 from academia, 26 from industry, and four from government, among others).
A total of 80 eligible papers were submitted from 26 countries, including Asia, North America, and Europe. The submitted papers were carefully peer-reviewed by our Technical Program Committee (TPC). Each paper received at least three reviews, thus hopefully providing valuable feedback to the authors and ensuring high confidence in the outcome of the review process. In total, the TPC completed 302 reviews, for an average of 3.8 reviews per paper. For each track, the accepted papers were selected based on all the review results, including reviewers’ comments. On Tuesday, three tutorials were offered. Abbas Jamalipour (University of Sydney, Australia) spoke about scaling dense-traffic cellular networks through software defined networking. Noriaki Kamiyama (Osaka University & NTT Network Technology Laboratories, Japan) presented a tutorial on advances in reducing Web response time. Dimitri Papadimitriou (Nokia - Bell Labs, Belgium) reviewed a number of open challenges in network optimization. Each tutorial attracted approximately 70-80 attendees.
On Wednesday afternoon, two keynotes were delivered at the HPSR and iPOP joint plenary session. Before the two keynotes, a piano concert was held. Rutsuko Yamagishi, renowned pianist, played F. Liszt and S. Rachmaninov on the piano at Fujiwara Memorial Hall at Keio University. Ken-ichi Sato (Nagoya University, Japan) gave a keynote on how optical technologies are expected to help mitigate the adverse effects of the imminent demise of Moore’s Law. Tarik Taleb (Aalto University, Finland) presented a keynote on network softwarization toward 5G. On Thursday morning, a keynote was presented by Akihiro Nakao (University of Tokyo, Japan) on the software defined data plane and applications. The joint plenary attracted more than 300 attendees.
The technical program, from Wednesday through Friday, comprised eight regular technical sessions: Data Center Networks, Routing, Optical Switching and Networking, Software Defined Networks, Secure and Green Technologies, Switches/Packet Processors/ Traffic Monitoring, Network Virtualization, and Resource Allocation. On Thursday afternoon there was a poster session with eight poster presentations, and a workshop on high performance IP and photonic networks including 18 poster presentations. On Friday morning, Luigi Rizzo (Università di Pisa, Italy) gave an invited talk focusing on how to build efficient network data planes in software, and Dimitri Papadimitriou (Nokia–Bell Labs, Belgium) gave an invited talk on research challenges and perspectives toward Information-driven networks.
As a part of the conference technical program, on Tuesday two technical tours were conducted, one on the Keio K2 Campus to visit advanced science and technical labs, and one of Keio Digital Media Contents (DMC) to emphasize research on digital media and content. The Keio K2 Campus tour, which was guided by Naoaki Yamanaka (Keio University), included three lab visits and technical demonstrations, covering the robotics and artificial technology project dedicated to advance medical sciences; the photonics polymer project for innovative ultra high-definition liquid- crystal displays; and the elastic lambda aggregation project for high-speed future networks. The elastic lambda aggregation project, which is one of the largest Japanese national projects in the area of elastic optical networks, presented the first live demonstration of elastic multi-port wavelength selective switches. The entire tour was enjoyable and the percipients learned new technologies via lectures from top-leading professors and researchers. The Keio DMC tour was guided by Kunitake Kaneko (Keio University). Participants experienced the same content of a testing movie, but taken in different environments. Moreover, the participants experienced a demonstrated 3D movie, which is one of the innovative future high-speed network applications. The participants were allowed to see the server room of the system. This studio is not only doing the testing but also managing the archive of the media. Apart from the studio, researchers of this lab introduced their works. After the two tours were finished, more than 70 participants attended the Get Together Party, which was conducted at the Yagami campus, Keio University.
Before the conference banquet on Tuesday, the Yokohama walking tour was held. The walking tour covered about 2 km in the Yokohama bay area. The walking tour started at Minatomirai station and reached Peking Hanten Restaurant, Chinatown, which was the banquet venue.
During the banquet, the conference best paper award was presented to Andrew Mundy, Jonathan Heathcote, and Jim D. Garside (University of Manchester, United Kingdom) for their paper entitled “On-chip Order-Exploiting Routing Table Minimization for a Multicast Supercomputer Network.” Andrew Mundy received the award certificate plaque and Japanese traditional happi coat from Eiji Oki. The best paper was selected by the HPSR 2016 Award Committee based on all the review results, including reviewers’ comments and reviews by the Committee.
Malathi Veeraraghavan and Weiqiang Sun, HPSR 2017 TPC Co-Chairs, announced that the next HPSR would be held in Campos do Jordão, Brazil, on 27–30 June, 2017. More information can be found at http://www.ieee-hpsr.org/