Towards an Ecosystem for Reproducible Research in Computer Networking

Abstract

Reproducibility is key to rigorous scientific progress. However, many publications in the computer networks community lack support for reproducibility. In this paper, we argue that the lack is mainly rooted in the additional effort that authors need to spend, without expecting sufficient benefits. Based on our experience in both authoring reproducible research and reproducing publications, we propose an ecosystem that incentivizes authors and reproducers to invest additional effort. This ecosystem consists of various building blocks, which can be combined into venue-specific profiles. A key building block is the Reproducibility Challenge, which we suggest to co-locate with the annual SIGCOMM conference to leverage reproducibility research in practice.