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MobileServerless 2021
the 1st Workshop on Serverless Mobile Networking for 6G Communications
co-located with ACM MobiSys 2021
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Spurred by a growing need for programmability and flexibility, serverless computing is rapidly gaining the attention of mobile network stakeholders. The introduction of serverless architectures, also known as Function as a Service (FaaS), enables programmers to decompose network operations into atomic building blocks. This new paradigm represents the natural evolution of current cloud-native architectures, and a first glimpse into an actual fluid resource control that breaks current quantization and reaches ultimate flexibility. The advantages are evident and include: no service management, boosted resource multiplexing, liquid scalability, and high customization. The challenges to realizing a complete serverless approach in mobile networks are however important: software needs to be re-developed for this purpose, the scalability of routing traffic interconnecting functions must be explored, and resource orchestration becomes daunting. MobileServerless will facilitate discussions and novel contributions on the emerging topic of serverless networking for future mobile communications. MobileServerless welcomes both theoretical and more applied contributions, tools and methodologies, works-in-progress, demos and experience papers. Specific topics of interest include but are not limited to:

- Application of cloud-native and serverless concept to network function design
- Performance evaluation of cloud-native network deployment
- Simulation and theoretical evaluation of highly modular network functions
- New software architectures for network function design
- Management and orchestration solutions for cloud-native network functions
- Technical enablers for scalable packet forwarding in a cloud-native environment
- Security and privacy in serverless environments.

We will have two renowned keynote speakers:

- Dr. Volker Hilt, who is a Bell Labs Fellow and senior director leading the Autonomous Software Systems Research program at Nokia Bell Labs. Volker's work is focused on distributed software systems where he has made contributions in cloud computing, software operations, distributed multimedia systems, content distribution networks, peer-to-peer applications and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). He has designed the overload control mechanism for SIP, which has become a key part of today's telecommunication systems. Volker received a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2001 from the University of Mannheim in Germany. He joined Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ, USA in 2002 and moved to Stuttgart, Germany in 2012. Volker is an IEEE senior member and has published over 100 papers, Internet drafts and RFCs and holds over 30 patents.

- Dr. Paul Castro, who is a Research Staff Member and Manager at the IBM Watson Research Center. He currently works on Hybrid Cloud Programming Models and Systems with interests in Serverless computing models, cloud platforms, and developer tooling for cloud-native development. He has been active in research on mobile and pervasive computing, cloud infrastructure, wireless location systems, location databases, stream processing, and enterprise web applications and has been awarded several patents in these areas. He has worked on cloud services for supporting mobile applications running on various smartphone platforms. Work from his research in the area of multi-device application support was recently released as part of the IBM Bluemix Mobile Backend as a Service. He has earned two IBM Technical Achievement Awards for the IBM SmartCloud Web Meetings for mobile clients and the Intelligent Notification System. He worked extensively on enterprise solutions work for the Apple+IBM partnership. He has also worked on Apache OpenWhisk which powers IBM Cloud Functions.

Important Dates:
- Submissions due: May 7th, 2021
- Notification of acceptance: June 4th, 2021
- Camera-ready due: June 11th, 2021
- Workshop date: TBD (Mid July 2021)

We solicit submissions of ongoing and works with preliminary results that can generate significant interest and discussions at the workshop. Submissions must be limited to 6 pages including references. All submissions must be original work not under review at any other workshop, conference, or journal.

More information at https://www.it.uc3m.es/mbsvless21/submission/.

We look forward to receiving your submissions,

Dr. Marco Fiore, IMDEA Networks Institute
Dr. Andres Garcia-Saavedra, NEC Laboratories Europe
Dr. Marco Gramaglia, University Carlos III of Madrid
Dr. Eduard Marin, Telefonica Research