Today we are witnessing the convergence of two largest communication infrastructures: the Internet and the  cellular networks. On one hand, the success of the Internet is unprecedented in human history. On the other hand, the infrastructure of cellular networks is experiencing explosive growth in recent years, notably in Asia Pacific region where it has deployed the largest cellular networks in operations today and been one of the leaders in the development and commercialization of mobile wireless technologies.  When successfully converged, the resulting single infrastructure will provide truly ubiquitous and pervasive data communication services for the global population with billions of users, and perhaps with orders of magnitude more data devices, to enable the vision of  “any time, anywhere, any device” information services in a global scale.

  This historical convergence is facing grand challenges. Although the cellular network operators are evolving their networks towards providing Internet data services, the overall architectural design of the future mobile Internet is still in the early stage of research and the crystal ball of the future remains cloudy. Several major unknowns and challenges exist.  For example,

    1)       Operational Networks

   There is a lack of understanding on operational and management realities of cellular networks to support Internet service.  They include user/application behaviors in the global scale (both the patterns of communications that have been carried by cellular networks,  and new applications and services patterns), reliability and security of the networks, and failures and misconfigurations of network components and systems. There is also a lack of management and visualization tools for monitoring and diagnosis of the network infrastructure, and a lack of understanding in incremental deployment and transition strategies to the new infrastructure. Once better understood, these aspects on operational networks will provide new research directions and offer problems to the research community, which will have immediate and long-lasting impacts on operational networks.  We also seek to bring together operators in different regions (e.g., T-Mobile in the US and Europe,  and several major ones in Asia) to identify possible geographic differences.

    2)       Emerging technologies on the convergence toward mobile Internet via the cellular networks

  The technology path of cellular networks has mainly followed along the telecommunication track.  Emerging networks such as 3GPP+/4G will observe new trends and face new challenges when adopting IP-based design paradigm. First, it will be data-centric, with phone calls being one of many diverse applications on handheld devices. Second, it may have to support billions of mobile devices running a diverse set of Internet applications in a global scale. Third, the degree of heterogeneity of mobile devices will likely be unprecedented even compared with the diversity of desktop and notebook computers.

    All these aspects have attracted very active research efforts to revisit many research issues ranging from IP-based mobility support for billions of mobile devices, better wireless access techniques through new PHY technologies and cross-layer designs, energy-saving solutions, intelligent service migration and partition between the infrastructure and end devices, security and fault tolerance of networks, and testbeds and field trials.

  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. Our main goals are twofold. On one hand, we seek to solicit new research contributions from the research community regarding some of the well-formulated problems on the convergence towards the mobile Internet via cellular networks. On the other hand, we seek to identify new issues from the operational realities of the cellular networks, formulate and present new problems to the research community. 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.

    The workshop consists of two panels plus several paper sessions. As for the two panels, one is to invite speakers from the network operators and product vendors, so that they share with the research community on their perspective on the requirements and challenges of Mobile Internet,  and the other panel is to let academic researchers share their solutions or the identified opportunities of Mobile Internet.  The paper sessions will solicit high-quality papers or work-in-progress on different networking protocols/algorithms and mobile computing solutions to the mobile Internet via the cellular networks.

Abstracts submission due:
June 8, 2009

June 13, 2009, 11:59 PM PDT (firm deadline)

Paper submissions due:
June 15, 2009

June 25, 2009, 11:59 PM PDT

Extended to June 30, 2009, 11:59 PM PDT

Notification of acceptance:
July 15, 2009

Camera-ready version due: 
August 1, 2009

July 23, 2009, 11:59 PM PDT