Modern network infrastructure must support rapidly growing and increasingly diverse workloads while providing high throughput, low and predictable latency, reliability, resilience, and energy efficiency. Emerging applications — including large-scale AI training and inference — are placing unprecedented demands on communication within and across data centers, clouds, edge environments, mobile networks, and the Internet backbone. Meeting these requirements calls for advances spanning networking hardware, interconnects, programmable data planes, transport protocols, network virtualization, resource management, and network operations.
This track solicits research on the design, implementation, and operation of flexible and programmable network infrastructure across multiple domains, including wide-area, data-center, mobile, edge, and non-terrestrial networks. Of particular interest are infrastructure technologies that enable demanding workloads such as distributed AI, including high-performance and reconfigurable fabrics, accelerator interconnects, network/compute/storage co-design, in-network computing, and network-aware resource management. Optical networking is becoming an increasingly central part of this infrastructure, from optical circuit switching and co-packaged optics in AI data centers to disaggregated, open, and multi-band optical transport in metro and long-haul networks. The track therefore welcomes work on the design, integration, and operation of optical and photonic infrastructure, including its coordination with the packet layer and with the compute and storage resources it interconnects. The track also welcomes work on network observability, automation, reliability, security, sustainability, deployment and operations, as well as mechanisms that expose network capabilities to applications and enable closer application-network co-design. Finally, it also encompasses research and development on aspects such as network management, governance or policy.
• Internet backbone, wide-area, cloud, and inter-data-center networking
• Data-center networks and high-performance interconnects
• Network infrastructure for AI/ML training and inference
• Accelerator networking, SmartNICs/DPUs/IPUs, and network offloading
• Mobile, 5G/6G, Cloud RAN, Open RAN, and disaggregated network infrastructure
• Edge-cloud continuum and distributed edge infrastructure
• Non-terrestrial, satellite, and integrated terrestrial/non-terrestrial network infrastructure
• Programmable, software-defined, virtualized, and cloud-native networks
• Optical, photonic, and reconfigurable network infrastructure
• Optical circuit switching, co-packaged optics, and optical interconnects for data centers and AI clusters
• Disaggregated, open, and multi-band optical transport for metro, long-haul, and submarine networks
• Optical access, fronthaul, and converged optical-wireless infrastructure for 5G/6G and Open RAN
• Resource management, network slicing, orchestration, and network-aware workload placement
• Application-network co-design, network APIs, and intent-based networking
• Network telemetry, measurement, observability, verification, diagnosis, and debugging
• Autonomous and AI-assisted network management and operations
• Security, reliability, fault tolerance, and resilience of network infrastructure
• Sustainable, energy-efficient, and carbon-aware network infrastructure
• Planning, provisioning, deployment, and operation of network infrastructure
• Governance, interoperability, standardization, and policy for network infrastructure
Track Chairs:
- Cristian Borcea, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA, borcea@njit.edu
- Kensuke Fukuda, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan, kensuke@nii.ac.jp
1. Manoop Talasila, ATT, USA, talasila@att.com
2. Abdallah Khreishah, NJIT, USA, abdallah@njit.edu
3. Armir Bujari, University of Bologna, Italy, armir.bujari@unibo.it
4. Celimuge Wu, The University of Electro-Communications, Japan, celimuge@uec.ac.jp
5. Xiaopeng Jiang, Southern Illinois University, USA, xiaopeng.jiang@siu.edu
6. Hong-Linh Truong, Aalto University, Finland, linh.truong@aalto.fi
7. Jin Nakazato, Tokyo University of Science, Japan, jin.nakazato@ieee.org
8. Wencan Mao, National Institute of Informatics, Japan, wencan_mao@nii.ac.jp
9. Satoru Kobayashi, Hirishima City University, Japan, kobayashi-s@hiroshima-cu.ac.jp
10. Kalika Suksomboon , National Electronics and Computer Technology Center, Thailand, kalika.suk@nectec.or.th
11. Loic Desgeorges, ENS-Lyon, France, loic.desgeorges@ens-lyon.fr
12. Phi Le Nguyen, Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Vietnam, lenp@soict.hust.edu.vn
13. Kien NGUYEN, University of Chiba, Japan, nguyen@chiba-u.jp