# HotNets — ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks

- **Submission deadline**: 2026-07-16
- **Notification date**: 2026-09-24
- **Conference date**: 2026-11-16
- **Location**: Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
- **Rankings**: CCF C · QUALIS B3
- **Conference Partner Index**: 65.4/100 (ranked #414, confidence 0.80, algorithm 1.1) — how this is computed: https://www.myhuiban.com/ranking
- **Trackers**: 98
- **Attendees**: 5
- **Canonical page**: https://www.myhuiban.com/conference/314

## Past editions

| Year | Deadline | Conference date | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 2025-07-01 | 2025-11-17 | College Park, Maryland, USA |

## Call for papers

The 25th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets 2026) will bring together researchers to explore the future of computer networking and networked systems. HotNets has long served as a venue for ambitious new ideas that challenge assumptions and shape the direction of the field. Continuing this tradition, HotNets 2026 will provide a forum for both emerging technical directions and broader discussions about how networking research, and the networking community itself, should evolve. We invite researchers to submit papers presenting ambitious early-stage technical ideas with the potential to influence the future of networking research. We seek new systems, architectures, protocols, measurements, and applications, as well as novel ways of thinking about the design, operation, and evolution of networked systems. We seek exciting new ideas over incremental, well-baked systems. An ideal submission has the potential to open a line of inquiry for the community that results in multiple conference papers in related venues rather than a single follow-on conference paper. We strongly discourage "conference papers in miniature." The program committee will explicitly favor papers that challenge assumptions, stimulate reflection and discussion, and have the potential to shape future research directions over incremental work that is already ready for conference publication. Strong submissions should clearly articulate how their contribution differs from, challenges, or extends existing lines of work. Authors should explain what assumptions, abstractions, or research questions their work reconsiders, and why doing so opens new opportunities for networking research. We particularly encourage papers that reframe familiar problems, identify overlooked questions, or propose new ways of thinking about the design, evaluation, and evolution of networked systems. Papers will be evaluated based on the novelty and significance of the technical contribution, the soundness of the methodology or reasoning, and their potential to influence future systems and research directions. We explicitly encourage bold ideas that may not yet be fully validated, provided they are technically sound and intellectually substantive. Full implementations and exhaustive evaluations are not required, although submissions should provide sufficient grounding to enable meaningful engagement and assessment by the community. The program committee will conduct a first review round focused on assessing the paper’s central contribution, intellectual ambition, and potential to influence future research directions or stimulate meaningful discussion within the HotNets community. This round will be based primarily on the paper’s abstract and introduction. Authors should therefore ensure that these sections clearly and compellingly convey the paper’s contribution, significance, and relevance to the HotNets audience. HotNets takes a broad view of networking research. The scope includes (but is not limited to) new ideas that relate to mobile, wide-area, data-center, home, and enterprise networks and that use a variety of link technologies (e.g. wired, wireless, optical, visual, and acoustic), as well as social networks and network architecture. HotNets encompasses all aspects of networks, which include (but are not limited to) packet-processing and transmission hardware and software, virtualization, mobility, provisioning and resource management, performance, energy consumption, sustainability, topology, robustness, measurement, diagnosis, verification, privacy, security, economics and evolution, theory, usability, machine learning, and interactions with applications. Accepted papers will appear in the ACM Digital Library.

## Related conferences

- HotWeb — IEEE Workshop on Hot Topics in Web Systems and Technologies — https://www.myhuiban.com/conference/1785
- HotCloud — USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing — https://www.myhuiban.com/conference/98
- HotEdge — USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Edge Computing — https://www.myhuiban.com/conference/2654
- HotDep — International Workshop on Hot Topics in System Dependability — https://www.myhuiban.com/conference/1557
- HotOS — USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems — https://www.myhuiban.com/conference/346

## Related journals

- IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence — https://www.myhuiban.com/journal/1052
- Knowledge-Based Systems — https://www.myhuiban.com/journal/227
- Future Generation Computer Systems — https://www.myhuiban.com/journal/36
- Neurocomputing — https://www.myhuiban.com/journal/234
- Pattern Recognition Letters — https://www.myhuiban.com/journal/236

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Source: Conference Partner — https://www.myhuiban.com/conference/314 (rankings reproduced from CCF / ICORE / QUALIS; data cached up to 1 hour)