The organizers, Sourav Bhattacharya (sourav@asu.edu), Jeffrey M. Capone (jcapone@asu.edu), and Kevin Dooley (kevin.dooley@asu.edu) will hold an exploratory workshop to investigate the research issues in quality and process aspects in the engineering and operation of complex network systems. The focus and motivation for this workshop stems from recognizing the immense practical utility and impact that software process and quality research has made to the development of software - leading to the subject area of "software engineering". The objective of this research is to create similar impact in the network engineering and operations area. In Network Engineering & Operations (NEO), design process and quality-oriented research is largely missing. The state-of-the-art in NEO process is similar to the unstructured approach of software development that is clearly outdated now, and often considered harmful. A good NEO process should allow a network developer or engineer to commence with a set of requirements, specify them, analyze them, consider high level design alternatives, adopt an implementation, operate the network efficiently, and test them in a cost effective, controlled and evolutionary manner.
The focus of this workshop would be to discuss the research issues in NEO. The researchers will address research issues both along the lines of "Underlying Network Technology" and "Network System Engineering" area. Examples of such research issues will include, but are not limited to, the following: QoS and QoS testing; end-to-end integration; commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components compatibility and interface; traffic moderation and large-scale flow control; tools for life-cycle management, configuration control and network resource management; management of network scalability and growth; design and testing for availability, assurance, and cost-effective maintenance. The workshop will foster active participation from academia, industry and government. It will include invited key researchers from core network technologies area, as well as systems engineering, network operations and process & quality areas. The basic nature of this research is highly interdisciplinary, calling upon experts in the area of computer science, electrical engineering and process & quality (manufacturing). Participation in this workshop is open to all interested parties and contributors. Outcome of this workshop will include identification of some of the research issues in NE, and a roadmap to carry forward to the next step.
