About the MCN Workshop

“Mission-Critical Networking (MCN)” refers to networking for application domains where life or livelihood may be at risk. Typical application domains for MCN include critical infrastructure protection, emergency and crisis intervention, and military operations. Such networking is essential for safety, security and economic vitality in our complex world characterized by uncertainty, heterogeneity and emergent behaviors. MCN should comprise the best possible networking technology, infrastructure and services that may alleviate the risk and help save the lives of both the general public and the network users.

As advances in pervasive computing, wireless communication, ad hoc and mesh networking and networked sensor systems continue, more opportunities are being opened to mission-critical networks to benefit from these technologies. A primary challenge to the operations of mission-critical networks is to deploy a communication network that is dependable, autonomic, secure, and rapidly deployable. In order to operate effectively, the deployed networks should support services such as location determination of authorized and unauthorized entities, audio and video communication, secure emergency calling and alerting, and in-situ and remote sensing and control in a secure and dependable manner. In addition, efficient operation of such networks that typically include numerous resource-constrained components may benefit from cross-layer optimization, cognition, resource engineering, visual analytics, and service-oriented architecture. Another key feature for mission-critical networking is to support interactions among multiple heterogeneous networks.
This workshop solicits high quality technical contributions to the area of mission-critical networking. The manuscript must explicitly address relevance to MCN. Topics include, but are not limited to the following:
• Smart environments and infrastructures
• Rapidly deployable services and networks
• Vehicular networks
• Body sensor networks
• Cognitive and autonomic networks, protocols, and services
• Ubiquitous networking and services
• Security, dependability, privacy, QoS and performance awareness and trade-offs
• Sensor and actuator networks for information gathering and real-time control
• Decentralized and peer-to-peer resource management and allocation
• Trust management, security, interoperability, survivability and QoS support
• Context-aware network and service management
• Location determination and tracking
• Energy efficiency
• Admission, load and flow control
• Visual analytics
• Critical traffic and mobility analysis
• Cross-layer design and optimization
• Components and architectures for next-generation emergency calling and alerting
• Network policy management
• Testbeds, benchmarks, performance and experimental studies