3rd International Workshop on
Edge Network Softwarization
ENS 2024

Aim and Scope

The 3rd International Workshop on Edge Network Softwarization (ENS 2024) will be co-hosted at the 10th IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft 2024) that will be held from June 24th to June 28th, 2024 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) along with Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are playing a fundamental role in the softwarization of the network infrastructure. In particular, both technologies have revolutionized the way network functions and services are offered, which are often (partially) pushed towards the edge for enhanced performance, improved privacy, better agility and significant cost reduction. 

Accordingly, this workshop aims at providing an overview of the softwarization process that has started occurring in recent years and is involving the network edge, with focus on future-proof approaches that will be part of the advanced 5G&B and 6G network solutions. Edge network softwarization is a fundamental topic that has to be thoroughly investigated and pushed by the research community. ENS 2024 has the goal to meet together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry that are actively involved in network edge softwarization related research projects.

Topics of Interest

The topics of interest for ENS 2024 include, but are not limited to:

• SDN and NFV distributed solutions for the network edge in 5G&B and 6G network;

• Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) solutions for network edge;

• Service and network orchestration at the edge;

• Novel solutions for data-plane programmable (e.g. P4, eBPF, XDP) edge devices; 

• Artificial Intelligence and  Machine Learning at the edge;

• Serverless computing and Function-as-a-Service in edge and fog network architectures;

• Network-aware resource provisioning in Fog Computing;

• Advances to end-to-end tunneling technologies (e.g. VxLAN, IPSEC/GRE);

• Edge computing energy efficiency and resource optimisation; 

• Support for low latency applications at the edge (e.g. Tactile Internet);

• Edge-driven use cases (e.g. Agriculture 4.0, Industry 4.0, etc.);

• Privacy and security for the network edge (e.g. zero trust networks);

• Multi-tenancy of edge networks;

• Network edge availability and protection;

• Open Hardware and Software solutions;

• Converged optical and wireless architectures at the edge;

• AI-powered resource allocation and energy optimization at the edge;

• AI for automatic fault recovery of edge computing resources;

• AI-based Digital Twin application for networked services.

Important Dates
Paper Submission: April 5th, 2024 April 12th, 2024 (extended, firm)
Notification of Acceptance: April 26th, 2024 May 3rd, 2024
Camera-ready Submission: May 8th, 2024
Workshop Date: TBD (Monday, June 24th or Friday, June 28th, 2024)

Paper Submission

Authors are invited to submit original contributions for presentation at the workshop. All submissions must be written in English. Papers should be up to 6 pages, including references and all other material. They must use the standard IEEE two-column conference template, which can be downloaded from www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html. Accepted and presented papers will be included in the IEEE NetSoft 2024 Proceedings and published on IEEE Xplore.

The PDF version of the paper should be submitted through EDAS: https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=32173 

Workshop Organizers

General Co-Chairs

• Marco Savi, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

• Christian Grasso, University of Catania, Italy 

• Alessio Sacco, Politecnico di Torino, Italy

TPC Co-Chairs

• Sebastian Troia, Politecnico di Milano, Italy 

• Gianluca Davoli, University of Bologna, Italy

• Omran Ayoub, University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland, Switzerland

Past Editions of the Workshop

• 1st Edition (ENS 2022)

• 2nd Edition (ENS 2023)