IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking

About IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking

Overview

The IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ISO 4 abbreviation: IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw.) is a bimonthly, peer-reviewed archival journal covering original research in communication and computer networking. It is jointly sponsored by three of the world's leading professional organizations in its field: the IEEE Communications Society, the IEEE Computer Society, and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) through its Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM). This three-way co-sponsorship is unusual in scientific publishing and gives the journal a distinctive standing: it is simultaneously a flagship venue of the IEEE networking community and the ACM networking community.

Founded in 1993, the journal has published continuously for more than three decades and has become one of the principal archival outlets for networking research worldwide. It publishes six issues per year (February, April, June, August, October, December), with each issue carrying rigorously peer-reviewed papers on topics ranging from network architecture and protocol design to wireless systems, network security, measurements, and the application of machine learning to networking problems. The journal's print ISSN is 1063-6692 and its electronic ISSN is 1558-2566 (CODEN: IEANEP).

The Transactions on Networking — frequently called "ToN" by researchers — is widely regarded as a top-tier journal in computer networks and telecommunications. It is consistently ranked in the first quartile (Q1) in all of its subject categories in Scopus, carries a solid Journal Impact Factor from Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports, and appears on the China Computer Federation's list of Class A (CCF A) journals, the highest tier in that classification. Acceptance is highly competitive, and publication in ToN is treated in most academic hiring and promotion reviews as a strong signal of research quality in networking.

History

The IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking was launched in 1993 as a joint venture between the IEEE Communications Society, the IEEE Computer Society, and ACM. The partnership was a natural one: by the early 1990s, computer networking had grown into a distinct research discipline, drawing practitioners from both electrical engineering and computer science, and no single professional society could claim the field alone. The first volume appeared in 1993, and the journal has been published every year since, making it one of the longest-running dedicated networking journals in existence.

The journal's early years coincided with the explosive growth of the commercial Internet. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, ToN published foundational work on Internet architecture, congestion control, routing protocols, and network measurement — research that underpinned the operation of the modern Internet. In the 2000s, the journal's scope expanded to absorb the wireless revolution: seminal papers on mobile ad hoc networks, sensor networks, and wireless capacity analysis appeared in its pages, including the landmark 2002 paper by Grossglauser and Tse on how mobility increases the capacity of ad hoc wireless networks.

As networking research broadened, so did the journal. Topics such as software-defined networking, network function virtualization, the Internet of Things, edge computing, and machine learning for networking have all been covered in recent volumes, while the journal has deliberately kept its focus on original research contributions — it explicitly does not publish survey or tutorial manuscripts, directing such work to venues like IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials.

The editorial leadership has rotated among many of the field's most distinguished researchers (see the Leadership section below), with terms typically lasting several years. The journal's governance structure — a steering committee with three representatives each from ACM, the IEEE Communications Society, and the IEEE Computer Society — has remained stable throughout its history, ensuring continuity of quality and mission.

Today, after more than thirty years of continuous publication, the journal remains a hybrid publication: traditional subscription-based publishing is the default, with an optional open-access route for authors who wish to make their papers freely available. Back issues from 1993 to the present are available through the ACM Digital Library and IEEE Xplore.

Leadership and Editorial Board

The journal is led by an Editor-in-Chief (EiC), supported by a large editorial board of area editors, a group of Editors-at-Large, and a nine-member Steering Committee (three representatives from each of the three sponsoring organizations) that oversees the journal's operations.

Current Editor-in-Chief

As of 2026, the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking is Prof. Junshan Zhang of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Davis, USA. According to the journal's official people page, questions of a logistical nature should be directed to the journal's Editorial Assistant, while authors with questions about a submitted manuscript are asked to contact the editor handling their paper (whose name and email address appear in the online submission system).

Past Editors-in-Chief

The journal's official site lists the following past Editors-in-Chief, reflecting the caliber of researchers who have steered it:

• Sanjay Shakkottai — University of Texas at Austin
• Ness B. Shroff — Ohio State University
• Eytan Modiano — Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• R. Srikant — University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Roch Guerin — Washington University in St. Louis (previously at the University of Pennsylvania while EiC)
• Don Towsley — University of Massachusetts at Amherst
• Ellen Zegura — Georgia Institute of Technology
• Mostafa Ammar — Georgia Institute of Technology
• Jim Kurose — University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Editorial Board

The editorial board comprises dozens of editors drawn from leading universities and research institutions worldwide, including MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Texas at Austin, Purdue University, Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, KAIST, ETH Zurich, TU Berlin, the University of Vienna, and the University of Cambridge. A separate group of Editors-at-Large — senior figures such as Hari Balakrishnan (MIT), Jon Crowcroft (Cambridge), Edward Knightly (Rice), and P. R. Kumar (Texas A&M) — advises the journal on its technical direction. According to the journal's official site, "almost all aspects of this journal's operation are accomplished with volunteer labor, and the editorial board is no exception."

The journal also publishes conflict-of-interest guidelines requiring associate editors and reviewers to recuse themselves from papers with which they have personal, financial, institutional, or recent co-authorship connections, and requiring authors to declare conflicts when submitting.

Aims and Scope

The journal's official scope statement describes it as an archival venue for "high-quality, original research results derived from theoretical or experimental exploration of the area of communication/computer networking," covering every kind of information transported over networks, whether wired or wireless. It welcomes both theoretical and applied contributions, including reports of novel experiments with real systems. The scope is organized around five dimensions:

• Network types: networks of all kinds are in scope — from on-chip networks to inter-planetary networks — including communication, social, and computing networks, the Internet, edge networks, future-generation (XG) networked systems, and wireless systems such as cellular networks, WiFi, and the Internet of Things.
• Networking aspects: architecture, design, control, protocols, network software, network hardware, operations and management, measurements, and security.
• Methods: optimization, control theory, artificial intelligence and machine learning, formal methods, protocol and algorithm development, and testing.
• Application domains: the interaction between applications and networking, such as augmented/virtual reality, gaming, and customer experience.
• Interfaces with other domains: information dissemination and distributed-systems aspects of social networks, biologically or nature-inspired techniques for communication networks, and related interdisciplinary work.

A distinctive and important policy: the journal does not publish survey or tutorial manuscripts. Manuscripts whose main contribution is to review and classify the state of the art are explicitly directed to other venues, such as IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. This keeps ToN focused on primary research contributions.

Editorial Process and Peer Review

Manuscripts are submitted electronically through the journal's online manuscript submission system (Manuscript Central). Each submission is first screened by the Editor-in-Chief's office for basic suitability and scope fit, then assigned to an editor with expertise in the paper's area. That editor selects independent reviewers — typically at least three — who evaluate the manuscript's originality, technical correctness, significance, and clarity of presentation.

The journal enforces formal conflict-of-interest rules: editors and reviewers must recuse themselves from handling papers authored by their students or advisors, recent co-authors (within five years), colleagues from the same organization (within five years), financial collaborators, competitors, family members, or anyone whose work they cannot evaluate objectively. Authors are required to declare such conflicts at submission time through the submission system's profile.

Like most top-tier journals, ToN's review process is rigorous and can take several months; the journal is known for demanding standards, and acceptance rates at journals of this tier are typically low (the journal does not publish an official acceptance rate — see the FAQs below). Authors should expect at least one round of major revision for papers that survive initial review, and the editorial office encourages authors to contact the assigned editor — not the Editor-in-Chief — with status questions.

Impact and Metrics

The IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking is a consistently high-impact journal in its field. Key metrics, with sources and years, are summarized below. Metric values change with each annual release; always check the current Journal Citation Reports and Scopus for the latest figures.

A note on conflicting figures: third-party aggregators report slightly different values for the same year (for example, one aggregator lists a 2024 JCR Impact Factor of 3.0 rather than 3.6). Such discrepancies arise from different data snapshots, rounding, and whether figures are taken from the official JCR release or recomputed from other databases. The figures above follow the Journal Citation Reports release as widely reported; Scopus-derived figures (CiteScore, SJR) come from Scopus and SCImago respectively. For the authoritative current values, consult Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports and Elsevier's Scopus directly.

The journal's long-run impact is substantial: with an H-index near 190 and tens of thousands of citations across its archive, it ranks among the most-cited venues in networking. Historically it has held impact factors in the 3–5 range for many years, placing it firmly in the top tier of telecommunications and computer-networks journals.

Submission Guidelines

Authors planning to submit to the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking should consult the journal's official "Information for Authors" pages before preparing a manuscript. The key points, drawn from the journal's official guidance, are:

• Submission system: all manuscripts must be submitted electronically through the journal's Manuscript Central (ScholarOne) site; the editorial office asks authors to consult the website prior to submission.
• Originality: submissions must present original, unpublished research; survey and tutorial manuscripts are out of scope and will be declined.
• Formatting: manuscripts must follow the IEEE Transactions format and style (double-column IEEE template), with figures, tables, and references prepared to IEEE standards.
• Length and page charges: as with most IEEE Transactions, overlength page charges may apply to papers exceeding the standard page limit; authors should check the current fee schedule.
• Conflict disclosure: authors must declare conflicts of interest with editors and reviewers in their submission-system profile and note any editors with whom they have conflicts at the time of submission.
• Copyright: upon acceptance, authors complete IEEE's electronic copyright form; for open-access articles, authors instead sign an open-access publishing agreement.

Because submission requirements and fees are updated periodically, always verify the current instructions on the journal's official website before submitting.

Open Access and Article Processing Charges

The IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking is a hybrid journal: it accepts both traditional subscription-based manuscripts and open-access manuscripts. Under the traditional model, the article is available to subscribers and purchasers via IEEE Xplore and the ACM Digital Library, and no open-access payment is required. Under the open-access option, the author pays an article processing charge (APC) and the published paper is made freely available to everyone.

The journal's official "Information for Authors" page (IEEE Computer Society) states that authors choosing the open-access option commit to pay a discounted OA fee of $1,950 upon acceptance, with any other charges (such as overlength page charges or color-print charges) billed separately. Caveat: that figure comes from the journal's author-information document, and IEEE's standard article charges are revised from time to time — authors should confirm the current APC on IEEE's official open-access pages (open.ieee.org) before budgeting. IEEE also maintains read-and-publish (transformative) agreements with many universities and national consortia under which affiliated corresponding authors can publish open access without paying the APC directly.

Regardless of the access model chosen, every paper undergoes the same rigorous peer-review process; the access decision does not affect editorial handling.

Landmark Papers

Over three decades, the journal has published many highly influential papers. The following is a verified example of a landmark contribution that appeared in its pages; citation counts are cumulative and grow over time, so they are given as approximate and attributed:

• Matthias Grossglauser and David N. C. Tse, "Mobility Increases the Capacity of Ad Hoc Wireless Networks," IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 477–486, August 2002. This paper overturned the prevailing belief that mobility harms wireless network performance, proving that node mobility can be exploited to dramatically increase the per-node throughput of ad hoc networks. It is one of the most cited papers in wireless networking and founded an entire subfield on the capacity scaling of mobile wireless networks.

More broadly, the journal's archive contains foundational work on Internet congestion control, routing and switching architectures, network measurement and tomography, wireless sensor networks, network economics and pricing, and — in recent years — software-defined networking and learning-based network control. Readers can browse the complete archive, 1993 to the present, through the ACM Digital Library and IEEE Xplore.

Indexing and Abstracting

The IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking is indexed in the major scientific databases, including:

• Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) — Web of Science (Clarivate)
• Scopus (Elsevier) — coverage from 1993 to the present
• ACM Digital Library — full archive, 1993–present
• IEEE Xplore Digital Library — full archive with early-access articles
• Compendex / Ei Engineering Village (engineering literature index)
• Inspec (physics and engineering abstracts)
• DBLP (computer science bibliography)
• Google Scholar metrics tracking

Indexing in SCIE and Scopus is what makes the journal eligible for a Journal Impact Factor and CiteScore respectively. Authors should note that inclusion in these databases is maintained by the publishers and index providers; the lists above reflect the journal's long-standing indexing status as reported by the journal and secondary directories.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who publishes the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking?

It is co-sponsored and published by three organizations: the IEEE Communications Society, the IEEE Computer Society, and ACM (via ACM SIGCOMM). Production and distribution are handled through IEEE and ACM publishing operations.

What is the journal's ISSN?

Print ISSN 1063-6692; electronic ISSN 1558-2566.

How often is it published?

Bimonthly — six issues per year.

What is the current impact factor?

The 2024 Journal Impact Factor is 3.6 according to Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports (5-year IF also 3.6). The 2024 Scopus CiteScore is 7.4 and the 2024 SJR is 1.394. These figures are updated annually; verify the current values in JCR and Scopus.

What is the acceptance rate?

The journal does not publish an official acceptance rate. Any acceptance-rate figure found on third-party websites is an estimate or crowdsourced guess, not an official number. Like other top-tier networking journals, it is highly selective.

Is it open access?

It is a hybrid journal: authors may publish traditionally (subscription access, no APC) or choose open access by paying an article processing charge (the journal's author-information page lists a discounted OA fee of $1,950, but confirm the current fee with IEEE before submitting).

Does the journal publish survey papers?

No. The journal explicitly does not publish survey or tutorial manuscripts; such work should be directed to venues like IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials.

Who is the current Editor-in-Chief?

Prof. Junshan Zhang, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Davis, USA.

Where do I submit a manuscript?

Through the journal's online Manuscript Central (ScholarOne) submission site, linked from the official journal website. Consult the "Information for Authors" page before submitting.

Where can I read published articles?

Via IEEE Xplore and the ACM Digital Library (full archive 1993–present; subscription required for most articles, except open-access ones).

Key Facts