ACM Conext-2025 Workshop on the Polymorphic Network

In recent years, communication networks have evolved into critical infrastructure, enabling ubiquitous connectivity for massive terminals and command dissemination. They not only support consumer applications such as AR/VR, online gaming, and streaming but also facilitate industrial services like smart manufacturing, autonomous driving, and telemedicine. However, the current network development paradigm faces significant challenges in flexibility, scalability, differentiated service provisioning, mobility support, global operation and maintenance (O&M), and security assurance. These limitations hinder the ability to meet the diverse and specialized demands of emerging applications, including human-machine-IoT intelligent networking, all-time and space-time casual access, service performance guarantees, security and quantifiable design and verification, network big data, and distributed network computing. To fully realize next-generation networking, these challenges must be addressed through innovative architectural and algorithmic advancements.

The Polymorphic Network (PN) is an emerging paradigm in network architecture. Its ultimate objective is to achieve unified control and dynamic scheduling of both forwarding behavior and heterogeneous resources across the entire network. Building upon existing programmable networking techniques, PN extends and enhances their capabilities. Unlike the traditional IP-based Internet, PN evolves into a next-generation network system that supports the coexistence and evolution of diverse networking paradigms—such as IP, NDN, and MobilityFirst—enabling tailored solutions for specific application requirements. Furthermore, PN expands programmability beyond the conventional "resolution + matching + action" model to incorporate additional dimensions, including computation, storage, and forwarding, thereby enabling a fully customizable and definable network environment.

This workshop invites submissions on the fundamental theory, design principles, implementations, industrial applications, and operational insights of PNs. In addition to traditional paper presentations, the program will feature keynote speeches from leading academics to highlight cutting-edge advancements and help shape future research directions.

We welcome submissions on all aspects of polymorphic networks. Technical topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

• Fundamental Theories of Polymorphic Networks
• Network Architecture of Polymorphic Networks
• Polymorphic Network Applications
• Polymorphic Network Testing
• Polymorphic Intelligent Computing Network
• Endogenous Security for Polymorphic Networks
• Traffic Engineering
• Queue Scheduling
• Buffer Management
• Table Lookup
• Formal Verification
• Congestion Control
• Network Monitoring and Detection
• Network Power-efficiency