ACM Workshop On Cellular Networks: Operations, Challenges, and Future Design (CellNet), co-located with ACM SIGCOMM 2012

With the popularity of smart phones and tablets, we are living in an increasingly mobile world. Third-party mobile applications such as Apple Siri, iCloud, and Yelp are rapidly growing everyday and greatly enrich our lives. The eco-system for mobile applications is vibrant and conducive to open innovation. Even one of the most popular mobile OS -- Android operation system is open source. This allows many phone and tablet vendors to innovate on the hardware and firmware. Underpinning this mobile world, it is the cellular networks. Unfortunately, the cellular networks present a rather disheartening picture. They are closed, mostly proprietary, and constructed using closed monolithic equipments. The innovation is limited to a very small number of equipment vendors, not open to the general research community. As a result, cellular networks are prone to outages, dropped calls, performance problems, and hard to manage. The closed nature of cellular networks threatens to derail the mobile revolution or limit its true potential.

Research innovation in mobile cellular networks is hampered by the fact that most academic researchers have no access to cellular radios, source codes of cellular network equipments, cellular network management tools, and realistic network traces at scale. As a result,
most wireless research is conducted using WiFi. We believe this situation much change. To effect change, we would like to organize a workshop that brings network operators, and academic researchers together to address the problems. First, we would like academic
researchers to understand operational aspects of cellular network. Second, we would like researchers from academia and industry to jointly identify the challenges, and propose future designs so that cellular networks can evolve to meet the growing challenges of a
mobile world.



1 Operational Networks
Despite some recent work in 3G network measurements (largely from or in collaboration with AT&T Research, Sprint Research), there is a general lack of understanding on the operational, monitoring and management aspects of cellular networks. These include understanding the interactions between various applications and the cellular network, reliability
and security of the networks, and failures and misconfigurations of network components and systems. Once These issues are better understood, research community will be able to offer incremental fixes or brand new solutions, which can have immediate and long-lasting impacts on operational networks.

2 Challenges and Future Design

Cellular networks have evolved to LTE, an all-IP architecture. This architecture solves many problems of the old circuit-switched architecture. However, it still faces many challenges: difficult to scale up access bandwidth, hard to accomodate new protocols and architectural
innovations, hard to implement security and reliability mechanisms. We seek to solicit papers that identify the fundamental challenges of current cellular networks, and propose new designs for future cellular networks.

Our workshop aims to bring together the wireless mobility research community as well as the vendor and operator community to share the recent advances in wireless cellular technology and their views on the future mobile Internet. We seek to identify new issues from the
operational realities of the cellular networks, formulate and present new problems to the research community. We want to address not only immediate problems, but also long-term problems which may require radical redesign of the cellular network architecture, e.g. new physical layer, new architecture. The end goal is to foster interactions between the research community and the mobile operators and vendors, a much needed cross-dialogue that has been
largely missing in the past.