Kudos to all the authors!

• M. Satyanarayanan, “Pervasive Computing: Vision and Challenges,” IEEE Personal Communications, 8(4), August 2001.
  • The paper connects the vision of pervasive computing to distributed systems and mobile computing as we knew them then, then draws fundamental observations of what system components still needed to be developed and how. The paper is a travel in time. What we call today the “Internet of Things” was already described here, along with many other fundamental concepts such as edge computing, cloud offloading, energy-driven adaptation, thick and thin clients. As an eminent example of abstract thinking, the author revealed the essence of each and every research challenge independent of the technology available back then.
• Charles E. Perkins and Elizabeth M. Royer. “Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing,” ACM Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA), 1999
  • This paper presents AODV, perhaps the most influential ad hoc routing protocol to date. This algorithm proposes a novel and suitable solution for the operation of these dynamic and unstable networks. Its major impact on the industry and related standards demonstrate the practical importance of this work. Additionally, the protocol is a “must-teach” in academic curricula related to mobile networking.
• Eugene Shih, Paramvir Bahl and Michael J. Sinclair, “Wake on Wireless: An Event Driven Energy Saving Strategy for Battery Operated Devices,” ACM MobiCom 2002.
  • This paper pioneered the systematic use of low- and high-power radios in a battery-constrained device, by separating data and control channels, to minimize overall energy consumption. The approach is now used commonly in today’s mobile devices. Additionally, the rigorous experimental approach had a significant impact on the research methodology in mobile computing community.
• Jitendra Padhye, Victor Firoiu, Don Towsley and Jim Kurose, “Modeling TCP throughput: A simple model and its empirical validation,” 28(4), ACM SIGCOMM, 1998.
  • The TCP model presented in this work is arguably the one that significantly influenced the SIGMOBILE community. Not only elegantly simple but also capable of accurately predicting TCP’s throughput over a very wide range of loss rates. After two decades, it is still taught in several networking classes, and often used as a starting point for related modeling research.
• Rudolf Ahlswede, Ning Cai, Shuo-Yen Robert Li and Raymond W. Yeung, “Network Information Flow,” 46(4), IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, July 2000.
  • This is the seminal work on network coding that had a profound impact on the networking and mobile systems communities. The information theoretic analysis led to significant academic work for more than a decade in the networking community on leveraging network coding to build systems that achieve higher reliability and throughput.
• Bret Hull, Vladimir Bychkovsky, Yang Zhang, Kevin Chen, Michel Goraczko, Allen K. Miu, Eugene Shih, Hari Balakrishnan and Samuel Madden, “CarTel: A Distributed Mobile Sensor Computing System,” ACM SenSys 2006.
  • This seminal paper proposed to leverage commodity sensing units on on-the-road vehicles to revolutionize the monitoring of road traffic and road hazard/surface for improving road safety. In addition to significant academic impact, the paper also generated real-world impact with the proposed concept being widely adopted in popular map applications. Additionally, the network stack designs to tolerate intermittent connectivity also had an impact on delay-tolerant mobile networking, including those targeting remote inaccessible regions.