COMM

Welcome to the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM Conference in Toronto, Canada. It has been our pleasure to oversee the tremendous efforts volunteered by our technical program committee and other individuals in shaping this year's technical program. We hope that you will find the papers selected for the technical program stimulating and thought-provoking, and that you enjoy the conference!

SIGCOMM 2011 received 223 submissions, and we accepted 32 papers, for an acceptance ratio of 14%. This represents a modest drop over the number of submissions from previous years. We received submissions from authors in at least 36 countries, and the final program reflects the significant geographical diversity across submissions, with authors representing 12 different countries and 44 distinct institutions.

The SIGCOMM 2011 TPC comprised 50 members from academia and industry, reflecting the diversity of our community. The TPC members' research interests span the wide range of topics present in this year's submissions and accepted papers. The members of the TPC wrote at least three first-round reviews for all 223 submissions, as well as three or more second-round reviews for the top 101 papers. Thus, we had at least 6 reviews for each of the 70 papers that we discussed in the TPC meeting. Most second-round papers received significant online discussion between PC members prior to the TPC meeting, and in some cases we solicited additional reviews from external topic experts. In total, the submissions received over 1000 written reviews. Reviewing was double-blind, and was subject to a strict conflict-of-interest policy. PC members with potential conflicts of interest were excluded from all discussions of the relevant papers. Both of the TPC co-chairs were authors of submissions; these reviews were handled entirely outside of the online review system, so as to guarantee reviewer anonymity.

Almost all of the TPC members attended the TPC meeting in Boston in person, for 1.5 days of energetic discussion. Those who were not able to attend in person participated via a telephone conference. We strove, as TPC chairs, to ensure that all 70 papers received full and fair discussion, and we encouraged the TPC to consider prioritizing "appropriately risky" papers over otherwise comparable "correct but boring" papers when there was a choice. Each of the 32 accepted papers was shepherded by a member of the TPC, to help the authors improve their final versions.