Workshop on Wireless and Unstructured Networking:  Taming the Stray (WAHOC'08)

Wisla, Poland, October 20-22, 2008

As network customers, operators, and designers strive to bring more productivity and enjoyment into increasingly diverse areas of our lives, be it business and commerce, health services, crisis management, content distribution, or multiuser games, mobile communications and ubiquitous computing are becoming the leading interactivity paradigm. While being thus "condemned” to succeed, they raise at least two main challenges. One is the multitude of standards specifying reliable high-speed wireless networking solutions, and the resultant multitude of heterogeneous technologies that follow (IEEE 802.11, 802.15 and 802.16, Bluetooth, MANET, SANet, Mobile IP, and others). Making them coexist, let alone cooperate, requires integration of many diverse areas of research, such as internetworking, distributed computing, signal processing, networking theory, and economics. Can we venture to predict the outcome? Can we make a case for particular scenarios? Another challenge is the dualism of fixed-infrastructure vs. ad hoc networks. The latter, despite their 20-year presence in academic literature, have been remarkably slow to materialize in the real world. Attempts to blame this on our natural distrust towards systems under distributed control and lacking clear ownership do not sound convincing: P2P technology does away with central administration, yet it has become successful to the point of embarrassing network operators and intellectual property managers. Can ad hoc networks repeat the success of P2P without becoming an embarrassment? The purpose of this workshop is to address questions like the above, to look at wireless networking from a broader perspective, to present ideas and share experience from their verification.

Here is the non-exclusive list of topics: