Fourth IEEE International Workshop on Cloud Computing Systems, Networks, and Applications (CCSNA), San Diego, CA, USA

By Al-Sakib Khan Pathan - Workshop Publicity Co-Chairs, Ranga Rao Venkatesha Prasad - Workshop Publicity Co-Chairs, Tolga Soyata - Workshop Publicity Co-Chairs and Weiwei Fang - Workshop Publicity Co-Chairs

The 2015 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM) was held in San Diego, CA, USA December 6–10. Themed “Connecting All through Communications,” this flagship conference of the IEEE Communications Society brought together researchers from all over the world to discuss the latest advances in communications technology. The technical program consisted of 12 symposia, 22 workshops, 17 tutorials, as well as industry and business panels.

The Fourth IEEE International Workshop on Cloud Computing Systems, Networks, and Applications (CCSNA) was one of three full-day workshops held in conjunction with GLOBECOM 2015. The first CCSNA workshop was held at GLOBECOM 2013 to address the demand for cloud computing topics. The oneday workshop received 46 high quality submissions, and was well attended. We were proud to have Dr. Mladen Vouk (North Carolina State University, USA), Dr. Rod Smith (IBM, USA), and Dr. Masum Hasan (Cisco Systems, USA) as our distinguished keynote speakers. Continuing on the success of our first CCSNA, we organized the second IEEE International Workshop on CCSNA at GLOBECOM 2014, receiving 67 high quality papers and accepting 26. During the event, Mac Devine (Vice President of SDN Cloud Services and CTO, IBM Cloud Services Division) gave a keynote speech on “The Perfect Storm Intensifies–The Convergence of BigData, Cloud and the Internet of Things is Now at Full Strength.” Prof. Kishor S. Trivedi (Duke University) gave a keynote speech on “Capacity Planning for Infrastructure-as-a-Service Cloud.” We continued to organize the third IEEE International Workshop on CCSNA at IEEE ICC 2015. The demand for the event at ICC 2015 on Cloud Computing remained strong, as we had received 69 submissions and accepted 25 papers. We had two keynote speeches given by Prof. Jean Bacon (University of Cambridge) on “Information Flow Control for Cloud and Internet of Things,” and Dr. Wesley Armour (University of Oxford) on “Addressing the Big Data Challenge Posed by the World’s Largest Telescope.”

Cloud computing, as well as cloud-inspired business models, enable on-demand access to a shared pool of resources, namely computing, storage, networks, services, and applications. With the advent of cloud-based systems, cloud operators have been aiming at reliable, secured, privacy-preserving, and cost-efficient cloud design and management. As the cloud infrastructure aims at offering various IT resources as services, requirements of cloud applications vary based on the resources that are requested as services. Thus, the resources may refer to heavy computation resources, massive storage resources, high-capacity network resources, and so on. The heterogeneity of cloud applications leads to the challenge of holistic design of a robust cloud system that can oversee and handle the diverse needs of numerous types of applications. On the other hand, these challenges enforce cooperation of various players in the cloud system, each of which focuses on a different segment such as network, computing, applications, and systems.

CCSNA 2015 Workshop audience.

The International workshop on Cloud Computing Systems, Networks, and Applications (CCSNA-2015) aims at the crossroads between scientists, researchers, practitioners, and students from diverse domains in cloud computing research. The workshop aims at attracting contributions of system and network design that can support existing and future applications and services.

CCSNA 2015 was a joint effort by leading experts in the field of cloud computing from all over the world. Both Yaser Jararweh from Jordan University of Science and Technology and Burak Kantarci from Clarkson University served as the general chairs. The technical program committee was chaired by Houbing Song from West Virginia University, who is the director of the Security and Optimization for Networked Globe Laboratory (SONG Lab, www.SONGLab.us), Fen Hou from the University of Macau, Kuan Ching-Li from Providence University, and Zuqing Zhu from the University of Science and Technology of China.

Following are the organizers of CCSNA 2015. General Chairs: Yaser Jararweh, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Jordan; Burak Kantarci, Clarkson University, USA. Technical Program Chairs: Houbing Song, West Virginia University, USA; Fen Hou, University of Macau, China; Kuan Ching-Li, Providence University, Taiwan; Zuqing Zhu, University of Science and Technology of China, China.

Steering Committee: Chuan Heng Foh, University of Surrey, UK; Jinsong Wu, Universidad de Chile, Chile; Periklis Chatzimisios, Alexander TEI of Thessaloniki, Greece; Yaser Jararweh (Jordan University of Science and Technology, Jordan; Andy Rindos, IBM Research, USA; Mladen Vouk, North Carolina State University, USA.

CCSNA 2015 received 63 papers and accepted 26, an acceptance rate of 41 percent. Papers were submitted from 26 different countries and regions spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia/Pacific, and Latin America. These papers covered the following topics:

  • Cloud computing systems and networking: principles, designs, analyses, and performance.
  • Big data, data centers, and cloud managements.
  • Cloud services, applications, security, and interdisciplinary topics.

CCSNA 2015 also featured two keynote speeches by Dr. Ilkay Altintas, who is the Chief Data Science Officer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), UC San Diego, where she is also the Founder and Director for the Workflows for Data Science Center of Excellence; and Dr. Ammar Rayes, who is a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco Services Technology Group focusing on smart services, IoT, analytics, and network management. Their speeches were entitled “The Role of Cloud Computing and Workflows in a Data-Driven World” and “Securing IoT Networks,” respectively.

The 5th CCSNA workshop will be held in Washington D.C. in conjunction with IEEE GLOBECOM 2016 (http://www.ieee-ccsna.org/ccsna_gc16/).