Guest Editorial: Bridging the Gap Between Industry and Academia for Networking Research

It has been widely acknowledged that there is a gap between the networking research conducted in industry and that performed by professors and students in universities. This gap is partially caused by the different goals of the two parties. Researchers in industry may focus more on the technology transfer side for offering better services and thus improving revenue for their companies. Academic researchers may tend to focus more on the intellectual challenges of either theoretical or practical problems, and advance the state of the art with novel algorithms, protocols, and architectures, without worrying about issues such as commercialization. Moreover, usually, there is limited access for academia to understand and appreciate the pain points of operating production networks and offering networking service at scale, and limited access to the non-public resources owned by private enterprises for more effective research (e.g., operational data of a network) due to the lack of broad collaborations between industry and academia. On the other hand, we have witnessed multiple successful cases where academia, government, and private enterprise worked together to commercialize some extraordinary ideas into real products. Our Internet may be arguably the most victorious story along this line, which was originally sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense as ARPANET to connect a few computers at universities.