It is a pleasure to announce that ITC as the first conference in networking science & practice celebrates its 60th anniversary with special events to be held during the next edition, hosted in Ghent, Belgium, on September 8th-10th, 2015. ITC has steered the evolutions in communications since its creation in 1955 and remains at the forefront of innovation regarding modeling and performance.
Over the past 60 years, ITC has provided a forum for leading researchers from academia and industry to present and discuss key technological and methodological advances in the design, performance evaluation and control of communication networks like the Internet. Today, ITC addresses the emerging paradigms such as an increasing diversity of distributed applications and services over various media like mobile/optical networks, enabling new markets and economy. For example, the convergence between networking and information technology enabled by virtualization techniques and cloud architectures is providing new stakes in terms of network architecture and service operations. Beyond performance and Quality of Service (QoS), different challenges like Quality of Experience (QoE), economic aspects and business models, energy savings, but also societal impact are considered.
In 1955, ITC emerged as the conference for all theoretical fundamentals and engineering practices regarding the large-scale deployments of telecommunications networks. For long time, ITC was the sole venue that brought together at large scale researchers from industry, network operators and service providers, as well as scientists from academia. These groups are the strong traditional roots of ITC. For decades, the scientific roots of communications traffic have been primarily based on the theory of probability and stochastic processes, modelling and performance evaluation and gave rise to the neologism ‘teletraffic’. However, along with time and technology and service evolutions, additional scientific areas have been considered to address issues raised by network design, economics and regulatory challenges.
ITC congresses were organized all over the world and visited 16 different countries while Specialist Seminars were organized in 14 different countries. Additionally, as part of its objective to disseminate know-how and expertise, ITC has set up regional seminars in 11 developing countries including Africa and Oceania, at a time when opening to the world was not as common as today. ITU was then the leading standardization body in telecommunications and the huge expertise developed at ITC fostered the liaison activity for standardization at ITU-T and the development program in connection with ITU-D.
The evolution of technologies of the 20th century
ITC has been witnessing the change of communication and networking technologies which are reflected in the proceedings and programs of the congresses. The specialist seminars and the motto of the congresses thereby reflect the hot topics of that time and the evolution. Selected topics of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s were
1998: Traffic Issues related to Multimedia and Nomadic Communications
1995: Traffic Modeling and Measurement in Broadband and Mobile Communications
1990: Broadband Technologies: Architectures, Applications, Control and Performance
1986: ISDN Traffic Issues
1984: Fundamentals of Teletraffic Theory
1977: Modeling of SPC Exchanges and Data Networks
Recent topics in the 21st century
With the rise of the Internet, new networking paradigms and technologies but also new challenges emerged:
2014: Towards a Sustainable World
2013: Energy Efficient and Green Networking
2010: Multimedia Applications - Traffic, Performance and QoE
2009: Network Virtualization - Concepts and Performance
2008: Future Internet Design and Experimental Facilities
2008: Quality of Experience
2002: Internet Traffic Engineering and Traffic Management
ITC today in 2015
This year the 27th ITC congress takes place in Ghent, Belgium. The theme of ITC 2015 is “Traffic, Performance and Big Data” reflecting the recent challenges today, for instance exploiting huge volumes of data available from connected devices for business, network operations, services.
With the emergence of the Internet of Things, the number of devices being connected to the Internet is steadily growing and huge amounts of data are being generated worldwide. Big data brings new traffic and performance related challenges and calls for a deep revisit of the methodological tools that were traditionally used for performance evaluation and traffic engineering. New models and approaches are needed to investigate big data characteristics in terms of volume, velocity and variability and their impact on network performance; new solutions have to be designed to efficiently and securely manage information; new techniques are needed to support all phases of network planning, design and optimization.
ITC still represents a wide and lively community of researchers and practitioners dedicated to push back the limits of knowledge in the area of networkin. As such, ITC is regularly organizing events like Congresses, Specialist Seminars and Workshops in order to discuss the latest changes in the modelling, design and performance of communication systems, networks and services. Today more than ever, ITC is attracting participants from all over the world.
Join the ITC community to celebrate this significant anniversary and prepare the future of ICT in the attractive city of Ghent, Belgium!
https://archive.itc-conference.org/itc27
Prosper Chemouil , Orange Labs, France - Chair of the ITC International Advisory Council
Tobias Hossfeld , University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany - Member of the ITC International Advisory Council
Michela Meo , Politecnico di Torino, Italy - Chair-elect of the ITC International Advisory Council
