Proceedings of the 4th ACM workshop on Challenged networks

We welcome you to the 4th ACM Workshop on Challenged Networks (CHANTS), the fifth workshop in its series after WDTN 2005 and CHANTS 2006, 2007, and 2008 focusing on communication in challenged networking environments in general and delay-tolerant networking in particular. Challenged and delay-tolerant communications are receiving increasingly more attention. The disruption-prone or opportunistic nature of networking peered with potentially non-existing end-to- end paths are becoming commonly accepted for research in many areas, including (but not limited to) mobile ad-hoc and sensor networks as can be witnessed from many recent publications addressing these issues. Particularly ad-hoc communication among mobile human users with their specific mobility patterns and application demands--for daily life and in extreme situations such as disaster management--has attracted many researchers' interest. We observe how research efforts expand their scope in many ways highly relevant to the future of challenged communication: from synthetic mobility models to realistic ones (e.g., based on human mobility traces), from routing protocols and optimizations to real applications, from isolated views of individual problems to system and integration aspects, and from simulations to implementations. At the same time, fundamental research on understanding and categorizing algorithms and protocols for challenged networks are pursued to provide a more solid foundation where our current understanding is still in the early stages. The focus of this year's workshop is on experiences with challenged networks, such as experimental results, measurements, implementations, full-system and large-scale simulations, operational experiences, deployment problems, and applications for challenged networks. A keynote will set the stage giving perspectives on the future research questions at hand. In our sessions, we will cover basic concepts on routing in opportunistic networks, protocols and incentives, as well as applications for challenged networks. From the 9 papers included in the workshop, 8 were selected out of 22 submissions, and we added one invited paper to the program. Each paper received at least three independent single-blind reviews by the TPC. In support of the trend towards implementation, this year's workshop provides a venue for primarily practical and otherwise hard-to-publish results and therefore includes a demonstration session. We hope that you will find the program interesting and thought-provoking and that the symposium will provide you with a valuable opportunity to share ideas with other researchers and practitioners from institutions around the world.