SMARTNESS Expands International Collaboration Through NOMS 2026 and Ghent University Visit

18 jun SMARTNESS Expands International Collaboration Through NOMS 2026 and Ghent University Visit

SMARTNESS expanded its international presence through two important scientific dissemination and academic collaboration activities carried out by researcher Tariqul Islam, a PhD student and member of the project.

From May 18 to 22, 2026, Tariqul participated in the IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS 2026), held in Rome, Italy. Recognized as one of the leading international conferences in the areas of network operations, management, and monitoring, NOMS brings together researchers, experts, and industry representatives from around the world.

During the event, Tariqul presented the poster “Why Realistic Background Traffic Matters: Low-Latency Transport Evaluation with MATGen.” The work introduces MATGen, a lightweight hybrid framework for modeling and generating realistic mobile application traffic while accounting for user behavior and interactions.

As a representative use case, MATGen was employed to generate background traffic in L4S (Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput) evaluation scenarios. The results demonstrated that realistic application traffic can significantly influence queue dynamics, latency performance, and congestion-marking behavior, producing outcomes that differ from those obtained using traditional constant-rate traffic generators such as iPerf.

Participation in NOMS 2026 provided an opportunity to disseminate research results developed within SMARTNESS, receive feedback from the international scientific community, and exchange knowledge with researchers working in networking and telecommunications.

Technical Visit to IDLab at Ghent University

Earlier in February 2026, Tariqul also carried out a technical visit to the Internet Technology and Data Science Lab (IDLab) at Ghent University, Belgium, a research center dedicated to topics including communication networks, future internet technologies, data science, and artificial intelligence.

During the visit, he met with Prof. Filip De Turck and members of the IDLab-DISCOVER research team to exchange research ideas and explore opportunities for collaboration.

The visit also included an opportunity to interact with SMARTNESS researcher Rafael Clerici, who was conducting part of his research internship at IDLab. During a dedicated meeting, the SMARTNESS vision, objectives, and research roadmap were presented. SMARTNESS Director Christian Esteve Rothenberg joined the meeting remotely and contributed to discussions about the project’s vision and long-term goals.

The discussions enabled both groups to identify common research interests and explore potential collaboration opportunities between SMARTNESS and IDLab.

The participation in NOMS 2026 and the visit to IDLab reinforce SMARTNESS’s commitment to scientific excellence, the internationalization of its research activities, and the development of connections with leading institutions and researchers in the international networking and telecommunications community.

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