Call for papers: Network testing series

The objective of the Network Testing Series of IEEE Communications Magazine is to provide a forum across the academia and the industry to address the design and implementation defects unveiled by network testing. In the industry, testing has been a mean to evaluate the design and implementation of a system. But in the academia, a more common practice is to evaluate a design by mathematical analysis or simulation without actual implementations. A less common practice is to evaluate a design by testing a partial implementation. That is, the academia focuses more deeply on algorithmic design evaluation while the industry has broader concerns on both algorithmic design issues and system implementation issues. Often an optimized algorithmic component could not guarantee the optimal operation of the whole system when other components throttle the overall performance. This series thus serves as a forum to bridge the gap, where the design or implementation defects found by either community could be referred by another community. The defects could be found in various dimensions of testing. The type of testing could be functionality, performance, conformance, interoperability and stability of the systems under test (SUT) in the lab or in the field. The SUT could be black-box without source code or binary code, grey-box with binary code or interface, or white-box with source code. For grey-box or white-box testing, profiling would help to identify and diagnose system bottlenecks. For black-box testing, benchmarking devices of the same class could reflect the state of the art. The SUT could range from link-layer systems such as Ethernet, WLAN, WiMAX, 3G/4G cellular, and xDSL, to mid-layer switches and routers, upper-layer systems such as VoIP, SIP signaling, multimedia, network security, and consumer devices such as handhelds.