The 24th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets 2025) will bring together researchers to engage in a lively debate on the theory and practice of computer networking and networked systems. HotNets provides a venue to discuss innovative ideas and debate future research agendas for the field.

We invite researchers and practitioners to submit short position papers. We encourage submissions that identify fundamental open questions, advocate for new approaches, offer constructive critiques of the state of networking research, re-frame or debunk existing work, report unexpected early results from a deployment, report promising but unproven ideas, or propose new evaluation methods. Authors need not support their ideas with full evaluations; we consider well-reasoned arguments or preliminary evaluations sufficient support for the possibility of the paper’s claims in HotNets.

We seek interesting ideas over incremental, well-baked systems. An ideal submission has the potential to open a line of inquiry for the networking and adjacent communities. We strongly discourage “conference papers in the miniature.” The program committee will explicitly favor early work and papers likely to stimulate reflection and discussion, ideally benefiting the networking community broadly, over incremental work that is ready for publication at a conference.

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 is 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.

This year, the program committee will do an initial fast round of reviewing that will provide early rejection or advancement to later rounds of more traditional, thorough reviewing. The program committee will select papers based on originality, likelihood to stimulate insightful discussion, and technical merit. Accepted papers will be posted online prior to the workshop and will be published in the ACM Digital Library to facilitate wide dissemination of the ideas discussed at the workshop.