Origin Address

The ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award recognizes papers published 10 to 12 years in the past in Computer Communication Review or any SIGCOMM sponsored or co-sponsored conference that is deemed to be an outstanding paper whose contents are still a vibrant and useful contribution today.

The past recipients of the ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Paper Award are:

• 2013:

  • PlanetLab: an overlay testbed for broad-coverage services, Brent Chun, David Culler, Timothy Roscoe, Andy Bavier, Larry Peterson, Mike Wawrzoniak and Mic Bowman, Proc. SIGCOMM CCR, Volume 33 Issue 3 (July 2003).

  For catalyzing a qualitative change in the nature of experimental networking research. By overcoming barriers to planetary scale experimentation and deployment, the authors---and their enduring testbed artifact---ushered in a new era of empirically validated network protocol design, catalyzed community-wide attention to the thoughtful construction and employment of appropriate research infrastructures, testbeds, and measurement platforms, and helped to foster a now vibrant research area focused on understanding Internet-scale network phenomena.

  • A delay-tolerant network architecture for challenged internets, Kevin Fall, Proc. SIGCOMM 2003.
    For anchoring a line of network architecture research that represented a sharp conceptual break from the internet-centric focus of the community at the time, substantially broadened the scope of applicability of networked computer communication, and remains a vital and active research topic today serving domains ranging from resource-poor rural environments to interplanetary space science support.

• 2012:
  • Tussle in cyberspace: defining tomorrow's internet, David Clark, Karen Sollins, John Wroclawski and Bob Braden, Proc. ACM SIGCOMM 2002.
    The "Tussle in Cyberspace" paper observed that different parties involved in the Internet's evolution can have interests that were directly at odds and that the conflict between these interests has a direct effect on the success or failure of efforts to update, rework or add features to the network. The paper, and its expanded version published a few years later in IEEE/ACM Tranactions on Networking, forced network architects and protocol designers to recognize the swirl of conflicting demands that could enable or derail their vision, and brought the term "tussle" into widespread use as a reminder of those demands.

• 2011:
  • Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications, Ion Stoica, Robert Morris, David Karger, M. Frans Kaashoek, Hari Balakrishnan, Proc. ACM SIGCOMM 2001.
  • A Scalable Content-addressable Network, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Paul Francis, Mark Handley, Richard Karp, Scott Shenker, Proc. ACM SIGCOMM 2001.

• 2010:
  • An analysis of BGP convergence properties, by Tim Griffin and Gordon Wilfong. SIGCOMM 1999.
  • On Power-Law Relationships of the Internet Topology, by Michalis Faloutsos, Petros Faloutsos, and Christos Faloutsos. SIGCOMM 1999.

• 2009:
  • A Digital Fountain Approach to Reliable Distribution of Bulk Data, by John Byers, Michael Luby, Michael Mitzenmacher, and Ashutosh Rege, Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM 1998.

• 2008:
  • Internet Routing Instability, by Craig Labovitz, G. Robert Malan, and Farnam Jahanian, Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM 1997.
  • The Macroscopic Behavior of the TCP Congestion Avoidance Algorithm, by Matthew Mathis, Jeffrey Semke, Jamshid Mahdavi, and Teunis Ott, CCR 27(3), 1997.
  • Modeling TCP Throughput: A Simple Model and Its Empirical Validation, by Jitendra Padhye, Victor Firoiu, Don Towsley, and Jim Kurose, Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM 1998.

• 2007:
• Towards an Active Network Architecture, by David L. Tennenhouse and David J. Wetherall, CCR 26(2), April 1996.

• 2006:
  • End-to-End Routing Behavior in the Internet, by Vern Paxson, Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM 1996.

In 2006, SIGCOMM also presented the test-of-time award to the authors of the notable papers from 1969 to 1995 that were published in a special issue of ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communications Review in January of 1995. The papers thus recognized were as follows:

• Research Areas in Computer Communication, L. Kleinrock (Vol. 4, No. 3, July 1974)
• Nomadic Computing - An Opportunity, L. Kleinrock
• The ALOHA system, F. F. Kuo (Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1974)
• Selecting Sequence Numbers, R. S. Tomlinson (Proc. ACM SIGCOMM/SIGOPS Interprocess Communications Workshop, Santa Monica, CA, March 1975)
• An Overview of the New Routing Algorithm for the ARPANET, J. M. McQuillan, I. Richter, E. C. Rosen (Proc. Sixth Data Comm.Symposium, November 1979)
• Congestion Control in IP/TCP Internetworks, J. Nagle (Vol. 14, No. 4, October 1984)
• Improving Round-Trip Time Estimates in Reliable Transport Protocols, P. Karn, C. Partridge (Proc. SIGCOMM '87, Stowe, VT, August 1987, published as CCR Vol. 17, No. 5, October 1987)
• Fragmentation Considered Harmful, C. A. Kent, J. C. Mogul (Proc. SIGCOMM '87, Stowe, VT, August 1987, published as CCR Vol. 17, No. 5, October 1987)
• Multicast Routing in Internetworks and Extended LANs, S. Deering (Proc. SIGCOMM '88, Stanford, CA, August 1988, Vol. 18, No. 4)
• The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Procotols, D. D. Clark (Proc. SIGCOMM '88, Stanford, CA, August 1988, Vol. 18, No. 4)
• Development of the Domain Name System, P. V. Mockapetris, K. J. Dunlap (Proc. SIGCOMM '88, Stanford, CA, August 1988, Vol. 18, No. 4)
• Measured Capacity of an Ethernet: Myths and Reality, D. R. Boggs, J. C. Mogul, C. A. Kent (Proc. SIGCOMM '88, Stanford, CA, August 1988, Vol. 18, No. 4)
• A Binary Feedback Scheme for Congestion Avoidance in Computer Networks with a Connectionless Network Layer, K. K. Ramakrishnan, R. Jain (Proc. SIGCOMM '88, Stanford, CA, August 1988, Vol. 18, No. 4)
• Congestion Avoidance and Control, V. Jacobson (Proc. SIGCOMM '88, Stanford, CA, August 1988, Vol. 18, No. 4)
• Analysis and Simulation of a Fair Queueing Algorithm, A. Demers, S. Keshav, S. Shenker (Proc. SIGCOMM '89, Austin, TX, September 1989, Vol 19. No. 4)
• A Control-Theoretic Approach to Flow Control, S. Keshav (Proc. SIGCOMM '91, Zurich, Switzerland, September 1991, Vol. 21, No. 4)
• On the Self-Similar Nature of Ethernet Traffic, W. E. Leland, M. S. Taqqu, W. Willinger, D. V. Wilson (Proc. SIGCOMM '93, San Francisco, CA, September 1993, Vol. 23, No. 4)

The award is given annually and consists of a custom glass award and reprinting the paper in Computer Communication Review. The paper will be chosen by an award committee appointed by the SIGCOMM Award Committee Chair.

To assist in the process, below are links to the tables of contents of the eligible issues of Computer Communication Review and SIGCOMM proceedings.

• Computer Communication Review: 1998-2000 are eligible for 2010.