acm sigcomm

Committee: Ratul Mahajan,  Dina Papagiannaki,  Jennifer Rexford, Vyas Sekar

Award Papers:

Link-level measurements from an 802.11b mesh network

Daniel Aguayo, John Bicket, Sanjit Biswas, Glenn Judd, Robert Morris 

Published in SIGCOMM 2004. 

This paper was one of the first attempts to bring a “systems approach” to wireless networking and in particular provides key lessons from one of the first real operational deployments of wireless mesh networks. The impact of this work was in spawning new directions in wireless network research and in significantly raising the bar for research and evaluation in this domain by bringing to the fore real-world complexities of wireless signal propagation. 

A first-principles approach to understanding the Internet's router-level topology 

Lun Li, David Alderson, Walter Willinger, John Doyle

SIGCOMM 2004.

This paper questioned the prevailing work on scale-free graph structure for network topologies that incorrectly speculated an “Achilles’ heel” for the Internet, and instead provided a methodologically sound basis to explain the observed structure of Internet topologies. The impact of the paper was in bringing a greater degree of rigor in network topology research and evaluation, and in informing the community of potential pitfalls in using black-box network models without a clear understanding of underlying structural effects in network design. 

The award papers were selected by a committee of Vyas Sekar (CMU, chair), Ratul Mahajan (Microsoft Research), Dina Papagiannaki (Telefonica), and Jennifer Rexford (Princeton). Papers co-authored by the committee members were excluded from consideration. All remaining papers in SIGCOMM sponsored conferences from 2004 to 2006 (SIGCOMM, CCR, IMC, CoNEXT, SenSys, and ANCS) were candidates for selection.