COMM

Welcome to the ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions (NSDR'08). This year's NSDR workshop is hoping to build upon the success of last year's SIGCOMM NSDR workshop. Given the enthusiasm shown at last year's workshop with an attendance of over 70 people, we decided to continue this workshop for the second consecutive year at SIGCOMM.

Today, it is evident that the benefits of the Internet and communication technologies are limited to a fraction of the world's population; according to the Internet World Stats 2007, Internet penetration in North America is 69.7% of population compared to 3.6% for Africa and 10.7% for Asia. We believe that technologies developed for the western world have been a poor fit in developing regions and even though technology can play a large role in developing regions, there is a need for technology research specifically aimed at these areas. To help foster research aimed at problems in developing regions we organized the NSDR workshop.

One of the main motivations behind organizing the NSDR workshop was the lack of available venues for disseminating ideas and results related to developing regions research. The goal of NSDR is to provide a venue for researchers to propose and discuss ideas and to participate in the sustainable development and deployment of Internet and communication technologies for developing countries. The great and diverse needs of developing regions (economic problems, social issues) call for a multi-disciplinary research agenda. However, the focus of NSDR is on communication and networking research issues that arise in the context of developing regions.

This year, we received 25 papers for ACM NSDR 2008 of which we accepted 8 papers for the final program. The submitted papers for the workshop encompass a wide range of networking and systems research topics including rural wireless networks, sensor networks, delay tolerant and intermittent networks, security issues peculiar to such regions, programmable cell-phone based applications, application-level challenges, transport protocols and more. Alternative to traditional research papers, some of the submitted papers outlined some of the hard challenges and experiences in building working systems and networks in such regions; such papers are incredibly valuable to this field since they bring a unique real-world perspective that are not commonly known. Many of the submitted/accepted papers in the workshop discuss real networked systems that have been deployed in the developing world. We strongly encourage you to come and attend the workshop and become a part of this growing research community.