The networking research community has made tremendous strides in developing novel architectures, protocols, and management paradigms for next-generation communication networks. However, a large share of results presented at major venues are grounded in analytical modeling and simulation-based evaluations.
While these methodologies are essential, the field faces a critical and growing reproducibility and experimental validation gap: research outcomes that have not been tested on real hardware, real protocol stacks, or realistic testbed environments risk remaining disconnected from practical deployment realities.
ERN fills that gap. The Workshop on Experimental Research on Networking provides a dedicated forum for presenting experimental results, reproducible methodologies, prototyping efforts, and testbed-driven research at the networking layer and above. ERN specifically targets work that involves real-world experimentation, hardware-in-the-loop validation, and end-to-end system prototyping.
Following a strong response to the call for papers, ERN 2026 runs as a full-day workshop: 10 peer-reviewed papers across four technical sessions, plus three keynotes.
Accepted and presented papers will be published in the NoF 2026 Conference Proceedings and submitted to IEEE Xplore®, subject to quality review and the standard presentation / registration requirements of the host conference.
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Note for authors — Authors of accepted papers interested in demonstrating a working system related to their workshop paper are encouraged to also submit to the NoF Demo track.
