Call for Papers

IEEE Network Magazine

Special Issue on Cloud and Data Center Performance

Modern data centers, consisting of massive farms of servers and abundant bandwidth availability, are becoming the next computing platform for the Internet. Cloud computing, as an efficient means of providing computing resources as a form of utility, uses data centers to play its pivotal role of leasing computing and storage resources to users. Cloud computing has already become prevalent with the burgeoning of cloud service providers, such as Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine. The paradigm shift to cloud computing is driven by a strong demand, especially from enterprises, to improve the overall efficiency of using and managing computing resources.

With the rapid growth of cloud users and with an increasing number of resource-demanding applications deployed, it is critically important to understand and improve the performance of cloud computing platforms, so that performance needs from hosted applications can be satisfied. In particular, the geographically distributed nature of data centers in a cloud and the architectural shift to container-based data centers have posed new challenges in the design, deployment and management of cloud computing platforms. These challenges, all of which are closely related to the performance of cloud applications, include the distribution and migration of large volumes of data, the reduction of operational costs, the multi-dimensional allocation of available resources, accurate monitoring and prediction of service qualities, flexible data center network architectures and communication protocols, intra- and inter-data center network traffic characteristics and engineering, strong guarantees of security and privacy, as well as the efficiency of virtualization and power consumption. This Special Issue solicits both original research and tutorial articles that discuss deficiencies in current-generation designs, present existing solutions in an insightful and comprehensive manner, and propose new strategies to improve the performance of cloud computing and modern data centers. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

With regard to both the content and formatting style of the submissions, prospective contributors should follow the IEEE Network guidelines for authors that can be found at http://www.comsoc.org/netmag/paper-submission-guidelines. Authors should submit their manuscripts through ScholarOne for IEEE Network Magazine. Choose "Special Issue &151; Cloud and Data Center Performance" from the drop down menu on the submission page. The timetable is as follows:

Manuscript submission: December 1, 2012
Acceptance notification: March 1, 2013
Final manuscript due: May 1, 2013
Publication date: July 2013

The Guest Editors for this issue are:
Bo Li, bli@cse.ust.hk
Baochun Li, bli@eecg.toronto.edu
Fangming Liu, fmliu@hust.edu.cn