The Sixth IEEE Conference on Open Architectures and Network Programming (OPENARCH) will focus software and hardware technologies required to facilitate the evolution of the Internet to better support new services. OPENARCH is an international forum with a single-track format that provides researchers and developers with a focused, highly interactive opportunity to present and discuss current work and future directions in network services, and in open, programmable network architectures.

Open and programmable networking is driven by the desire to allow the Internet to continue its rapid evolution whilst becoming the commercial network infrastructure of choice. However, over the last decade technological advances have led the network infrastructure to become more complex rather than less (multiple technologies, protocols and topological layers), obstructing the introduction of new network services. Over the last few years the open and programmable networking community has redefined the basic architecture of networking systems and has blurred the distinctions between routers and end-systems. At the same time, new services, such as p2p systems, have become immensely popular; they pose significant challenges for network providers and impose new requirements on the underlying infrastrure.

The goal of OPENARCH 2003 is to move forward the discussion and understanding of these issues in networking systems, network services and wide-area service deployment. We solicit submission of high quality original research in these areas, with emphasis on implementations and experimentation. Authors are invited to submit full papers for consideration. Suggested topics include: