Call for papers

The ACM MobiCom 2027 conference seeks papers describing significant contributions to the field of wireless networking and mobile computing. MobiCom emphasizes novel and foundational research, and at the same time, welcomes contributions grounded in real-world deployments and lessons learned from production environments. Submissions should advance the state of the art and provide insights, principles, or experiences of broad relevance to the mobile and wireless research community. MobiCom 2027 will not have separate categories for challenge, experience, or verification papers; all submissions will be reviewed as regular papers using a common set of review criteria.

Topics of interest

 

Building upon its strong foundations in wireless networking, mobile computing, embedded and distributed systems, MobiCom welcomes contributions spanning communication, perception, and systems that advance physically grounded intelligent systems. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Wireless communication and networking [next-G, satellites, underwater, vehicular, robotic-networks, ...]
  • Physical and embodied AI for mobile systems [generative, learning, and perceptual systems; world models, foundation models, physics-inspired learning, ...]
  • Applications of machine learning to mobile and wireless systems [on-device ML, edge AI, federated/decentralized ML, transfer learning/domain adaptation, …]
  • Novel communication/sensing modalities and platforms [mmWave, Terahertz, optical/acoustic communications, reconfigurable and intelligent surfaces, Quantum sensing/computing/networking, ...]
  • Advanced sensing/perception systems [multimodal sensing/imaging, localization & tracking, joint communication and sensing, scene understanding ...]
  • Human-centric and interactive systems and media [mobile health, implantable and medical systems, wearables, XR, HCI, mobile web, video telepresence, ...]
  • Energy-efficiency, energy harvesting and resource-constrained systems [energy-efficient mobile networks, RFID, LPWAN, backscatter, ultra-low-power systems, ...]
  • Edge computing and large-scale infrastructure [smart cities, IoT, urban mobility/transports, agriculture, ...]
  • Security and privacy of mobile and wireless systems [wireless and mobile security, secure communications, authentication, privacy-preserving systems, secure sensing and localization, ...]
  • Measurements and deployment [operational/production networks, datasets, benchmarks, ...]

Authorship policy and use of AI

MobiCom adheres to the ACM Policy on Authorship, including guidance on the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Authors are expected to comply with all requirements outlined in the ACM Policy on Authorship.

Review criteria

The review process recognizes that intellectual merit, novelty, and impact may arise from theories, algorithms, system designs, implementations, operational experiences, datasets, measurements, and applications. Papers will be evaluated based on originality, technical soundness, significance, rigor of evaluation, and impact. MobiCom encourages reproducibility through the release of artifacts and participation in the artifact evaluation process. Papers that clearly discuss assumptions, limitations, and lessons learned from real-world deployments will be viewed favorably.

Presentations

Starting in 2026, MobiCom Technical Program Committee (TPC) will select a subset of accepted papers for the full presentation slot in the program. The rest of the accepted papers will be presented in thematically organized sessions with relatively shorter lightning talks followed by posters. It should be noted that all accepted papers are deemed equal, regardless of their presentation slot length, and reflect that they meet the high bar for MobiCom papers in terms of contribution and quality.

Important Dates

 

 

Summer

 

Winter

Abstract Registration 

August 26, 2026 23:59 AoE

TBD

Paper Submission

September 2, 2026 23:59 AoE

TBD

Early Reject Notification    

October 23, 2026

TBD

Rebuttal Period

November 3-6, 2026

TBD

Acceptance Notification    

November 19, 2026

TBD

 

Two Deadlines, Early Notification, Rebuttals, and One-shot Revision

 

MobiCom 2027 offers authors the option of two deadlines and keeps the one-shot revision process to enhance the timeliness and quality of the scientific results from the research community. Each paper will go through the same rigorous reviewing process as in previous MobiCom conferences. The review process for each deadline will involve two rounds. Papers that are not selected to proceed after the first round will receive an early notification, including reviews. After the second round of reviews, the reviews will be released to the authors and who will be given a set time window to submit a rebuttal.

Rebuttals

MobiCom will provide an opportunity for authors to respond to reviews prior to the final consideration of the papers at the program committee meeting. Authors must limit their responses to (a) correcting factual errors in the reviews or (b) directly addressing questions posed by reviewers. Responses should be limited to clarifying the submitted work. In particular, responses must not include new experiments, new data, or new figures, describe additional work completed since submission or promise additional work to follow.

The submission of a rebuttal is optional. Rebuttals will be limited to a maximum of 500 words submitted in the online submission form. It is worth noting that available reviews will be released at the above-mentioned times. However, additional reviews might be solicited or submitted after the rebuttal period.

Final decisions will be one of the following

  • Accept: Papers accepted for publication will appear as part of the proceedings and the MobiCom website. Note all the papers in this category will initially be conditionally accepted. The papers that go through a successful anonymous shepherding process will eventually be accepted.
  • Reject: Rejected papers after the review process cannot be resubmitted to MobiCom until 11 months have passed since the last MobiCom deadline they were submitted to. We strongly encourage the authors to address reviewers' feedback before re-submitting the paper to MobiCom.
  • One-Shot-Revision: Papers, where a revision is required, will be given specific action points and can be resubmitted for the next deadline. For such papers, the reviewers will articulate a maximum of three major changes/clarifications that they would like to see. After the resubmission, the paper will be evaluated based on whether the authors have properly addressed the reviewers’ requests. Unlike in the shepherding process, the requested action points may include running additional experiments that obtain specific results and could take more than 4-6 weeks. During this revision period, the paper is still considered under review to MobiCom and therefore cannot be submitted to other conferences unless the authors first withdraw it from consideration.

Artifact Evaluation for Accepted Papers

The authors of accepted MobiCom papers will be invited to submit supporting materials to the Artifact Evaluation process. Artifact Evaluation is run by a separate committee that will assess how well the submitted artifacts support the work described in the accepted papers. Participation in Artifact Evaluation is voluntary and has no influence on the paper’s acceptance, but is strongly encouraged. Papers that go through the Artifact Evaluation process successfully will receive badges printed on the papers themselves. Additional details on the Artifact Evaluation process will be provided in due course.

 

Submission Instructions

All paper submissions will be handled electronically at the MobiCom 2027 paper submission website. Authors should prepare a PDF version of their full paper. All submitted papers will be evaluated through a double-blind reviewing process, with the identities of the authors withheld from the reviewers.

Note that titles and abstracts submitted to register the paper by the abstract deadline, albeit not final, must be sufficiently informative, i.e. it must contain a meaningful title and a meaningful abstract of at least 100 words which will reasonably correspond to the final version of the title and the abstract. Abstracts and/or paper tiles such as “TBD” or similar will be desk rejected. There will be no deadline extensions to the dates listed above.

All authors of the paper must be declared at the time of paper submission. Changes to the authorship list can only be accepted by the program chairs only if substantial reasoning is provided that the list of authors should change.

Before final submission, you are expected to make sure that your paper complies with the following requirements. Please do not violate these requirements with the aim of including additional material: submissions that violate the formatting requirements may not be reviewed. You can visually inspect a page-by-page report of your paper format using the same tool as the submission system via a separate online form. After the submission deadline, we will use the same tool to check the conformance of papers. The format checking tool uses heuristics and can make mistakes. The PC chairs will manually inspect and possibly reject those papers with evident format violations. However, no paper will be rejected due to format violations without being manually checked.

Any papers that do not adhere to the following guidelines may be immediately rejected:

  • Contain no more than twelve (12) single-spaced and numbered pages, including figures, tables, and any other material, followed by as many pages as necessary for bibliographic references. Papers whose non-bibliographic content is longer than 12 pages will not be reviewed.
  • Submissions may include appendices (following bibliography references) and they will not count towards the 12 pages. However, reviewers are not required to read appendices or consider them in their review. Authors should thus ensure that the core paper is self-contained.
  • Font size no smaller than 10 points.
  • Double column format with each column having dimensions 9.25 inches x 3.33 inches, a space of 0.33 inches between the two columns, and with no more than 55 lines of text per column.
  • Fit properly on US letter-sized paper (8.5 inches by 11 inches).
  • Submissions must be in PDF (Portable Document Format); authors should ensure that they are compatible with Adobe Acrobat (English version). Any other formats, including Postscript and MS-Word, will not be accepted.
  • Authors' names must not appear anywhere in the paper or in the PDF file. The PDF file must also not contain any embedded hyperlinks, as these may compromise author anonymity.
  • Limit the file size to less than 15 MB: contact the PC chairs if you have a file larger than this limit.

You may find these templates useful in complying with the above requirements. For Latex users, please use \documentclass[sigconf,10pt]{acmart}. But as an author, you bear the final responsibility to verify (manually or through the above online paper checker) that your submission is format-compliant.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

Submission Policy

 

In addition to the formatting requirements, all authors are expected to make sure that their paper complies with the following submission policies.

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM's new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy. https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/research-involving-human-participants-and-subjects

Previous Publications

We allow submissions that extend a previous work published as a poster, demo, or workshop paper such as at HotMobile or HotNets. However, in such case, the author(s) should (1) acknowledge their own previous workshop publication with an anonymous citation (e.g., "[7] Anonymized workshop paper") and (b) explain the differences between the MobiCom submission and the prior workshop paper (e.g. "This paper extends a prior workshop paper [7] and differs in the following aspects ..."). In addition, the online submission form will require authors to submit the deanonymized citation and a short explanation of the differences from the prior workshop paper. The PC will review such extended versions of previously published workshop papers in accordance with the ACM Plagiarism Policy.

 

No Simultaneous Submissions

All submissions must describe original research not published or currently under review for another conference or journal. It is ACM policy (ACM Author Rights and Publishing Policy, Prior Publication, and Simultaneous Submissions) not to allow double submissions, where the same paper is submitted concurrently to more than one conference/journal. Any double submissions detected will be immediately rejected from all conferences/journals involved.

The ACM policy on simultaneous submissions does not consider technical reports (including arXiv) to be concurrent publications or submissions.

Double-blind Submissions

All submissions will be evaluated through double-blind reviewing. Please do not violate this requirement by explicitly or implicitly leaking the identity of any co-author or institution. They include but not limited to the below requirements:

  • Please be sure your name and affiliation do not appear on the paper or in the submitted PDF file. This means that before submission, you must remove from the paper the authors' names, authors' affiliations, acknowledgments of funding sources, etc.
  • Please be cautious and careful how you refer to your own prior work in the paper. For example, do not describe your prior work with phrases like:
    “In prior work [3], we presented a routing protocol that …”
    Instead, refer to your work in the third person, such as
         “In prior work, Smith [3] presented a routing protocol that …”
    With this method, the full citation to Smith can still be given, such as
          [3] Smith, J., "Analysis of … "
    In particular, it is not acceptable to say
          [3] Reference deleted for double-blind review.
  • Please avoid advertising the paper with the same or similar title on social media, or through large mailing lists.
  • Authors may include links to websites that contain source code, tools, or other supplemental material. The link in the paper, however, must be anonymized. Reviewers are not obliged to review such supplementary materials and such links must not be used to provide additional text that does not fit within the 12-page limit of the paper.
  • Authors are allowed to give talks to restricted audiences on the work(s) submitted to MobiCom during the review. If you have posted or plan to post a non-anonymized version of your paper on a preprint server before the MobiCom decisions are made, the submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version. MobiCom strongly discourages advertising the preprint on social media, or in the press while under submission to MobiCom. Finally, any reviewer aware of the authorship of a specific submission, may not be allowed to review the paper, at the discretion of the PC chairs.

We will not review any paper that violates our double-blind policy.

Submissions will be kept confidential until accepted. Rejected submissions will be kept confidential permanently.

Conflict of Interest (CoI)

For a fair review process, program committee members who are COIs to any author of the submission will not review or participate in the discussion and decision-making of the submission. It is the author’s responsibility to mark COIs in the submission website.

We generally follow the ACM policy (Conflict of Interest Policy for ACM Publications) and also add and extend rules on the specific relationships to explicitly define COIs of one submission at MobiCom’27 as:

(1) any PC member who works/worked at the same organizational affiliation with any co-author in the last 24 months or reasonably expected to within the next 12 months;

(2) any PC member who has co-authored any book, article, report, abstract or paper with collaboration in the last 24 months or reasonably expected to within the next 12 months;

(3) any PC member who has collaborated on projects, such as funded grants, research proposals or others with any co-author in the last 24 months or reasonably expected to within the next 12 months;

(4) any PC member who is/was the advisor or advisee of any co-author;

(5) any PC member who graduated from the same research group and/or was under the same advisor/supervisor/manager in the last 48 months;

(6) any PC member who is exposed to the full or partial authorship of the work being submitted here in any public or private channel (including but not limited to interview talks, campus visits, research discussion, conversations);

(7) any PC member who has a close personal friendship or business relationship beyond professional settings that could affect the review process with any co-author;

(8) other perceivable conflicts.

A potential COI must be identified at the submission and can be updated at any point during the review process, but when possible, potential conflicts should be determined before acceptance decisions are made.

The author(s) must identify every COI out of all PC members (including chairs) with any author of the submission and indicate the type of conflict during the submission process. For other forms of conflicts (item 8), the authors must contact the program chairs and explain the perceived conflict.

Knowingly hiding or falsifying a stated COI, and knowingly and falsely asserting a COI — e.g., to prevent or alter peer-reviewing, to discourage appropriate reviewing, or to seek advantage of a preferred reviewer — are both considered as a violation of this COI policy. We will return the violated submissions with no reviews.

 

Previous Submissions

In case of any similarity between a current submission and a previous submission at MobiCom or other relevant conferences within the last 12 months, the authors are requested to do the following in three cases:

  1. For a one-shot revision, please carefully follow the instructions on the notification. Along with the resubmission, the authors must report the major concerns and requested items from the reviewers of the previous submission and write a summary of how the authors have addressed them in the revision. Please ensure your anonymity is retained in this summary.
  2. For submissions that have been recently rejected by MobiCom, it is required for the authors to do the same as in case 1. That is, please report the major concerns from the reviewers of the previous submission and write a summary of how the authors have addressed them in the current submission. Please ensure your anonymity is retained in this summary.
  3. For submissions that have been previously rejected by a conference other than MobiCom (such as Mobisys, SIGCOMM, NSDI, SenSys, UbiComp, etc.), it is strongly encouraged, although not required, for the authors to do the same items as in case 2. That is, please report the major concerns from the reviewers of the previous submission and write a summary of how the authors have addressed them in the current submission. Please ensure your anonymity is retained in this summary.

 

Processes for Conditionally Accepted Papers

 

Anonymous and Rigorous Shepherding

Conditionally accepted papers will be shepherded through a review process by a TPC member. Based on the feedback written in the reviews, authors of shepherded papers will submit a revision of their paper to the shepherd. The shepherd will collaborate with the reviewers from TPC to review the revised paper and provide the authors with additional comments. Note that the shepherding process could last 4-6 weeks and the authors might be asked to produce new experimental results and/or add new material. When the shepherding process results in final acceptance, the authors will upload their camera-ready file to the submissions system.

Video Presentation

The authors of each accepted paper must submit a 90-second teaser video introducing their paper along with the camera-ready version. These videos will be placed on the conference website and conference YouTube channel up to two weeks before the conference. A selected set will be featured by the social media channels related to the conference.

Registration and Presentation

By submitting a paper, you agree that, if accepted, at least one of the authors will register and attend the conference to present it.

 

Awards

All accepted papers will be considered for the Best Paper Award.

Authors of accepted papers are urged to ensure that the presentations of their papers meet the same high standards of accepted papers at MobiCom. Best student presentations will be recognized at the conference.

 

ACM Open Access Publishing & Pricing

 

Effective January 1, 2026, ACM transitioned to Open Access. All ACM publications, including those from ACM-sponsored conferences, will be 100% Open Access. Authors will have two primary options for publishing Open Access articles with ACM: the ACM Open institutional model or by paying Article Processing Charges (APCs). With over 2,600 institutions already part of ACM Open, the majority of ACM-sponsored conference papers will not require APCs from authors or conferences (currently, around 76%).

Authors from institutions not participating in ACM Open will need to pay an APC to publish their papers, unless they qualify for a financial waiver. To find out whether an APC applies to your article, please consult the list of participating institutions in ACM Open and review the https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/policy-on-discretionary-open-access-apc-waivers.  Keep in mind that waivers are rare and are granted based on specific criteria set by ACM.

 

 Subsidy, Waivers, and Discounts

Understanding that this change could present financial challenges, ACM has approved a temporary subsidy to ease the transition and allow more time for institutions to join ACM Open. Please visit ACM Open Access Publication page for information on 2027 subsidized APC pricing, waiver policies, and discounts.

 

Contact Us

For questions, please contact the Program Co-Chairs, Joerg Widmer and Nirupam Roy, at mobicom27.pc.chairs@gmail.com.