Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications

It is my pleasure to welcome you to Pisa for the 2006 edition of the ACM SIGCOMM conference. In keeping with our tradition, the conference will open with a keynote speech by the latest winner of the SIGCOMM Award, an honor that this year goes to Domenico Ferrari.Organizing a conference of the size and reputation of SIGCOMM is always a challenge, and it would not have been possible without the help of many people and organizations, all of which I would like to thank. It is my pleasure to start with the Universita di Pisa, which not only provided a huge help with logistics, equipment, administrative resources, and even some funding on it's own, but also let me and the Local Organization Chair, Giovanni Stea, spend a large amount of our time working on the organization of SIGCOMM 2006.In addition to the work of many individuals, this year we were extremely lucky, as we could rely on generous help from a number of companies and institutions. Our Gold Supporters are Cisco Systems and the National Science Foundation, who both provided funding for the Student Travel Grants. (Travel Grants also were made possible by the new SIGCOMM-sponsored Geodiversity Travel Grants program.) Silver Supporters are Microsoft Research, Intel, and Alcatel, who partly supported various social events. Last but not least, we have a large number of Bronze Supporters: AT&T, Digium, Google, HP, IIJ, Nokia, Tiscali and the Universita di Pisa.I am of course indebted to the other people involved in the event in various roles, who also invested many, many days on their tasks: Tom Anderson, Kenjiro Cho, Marco Conti, Jaudelice C. de Oliveira, Christophe Diot, Chris Edmondson-Yurkanan, Serge Fdida, Gianluca Iannaccone, Brad Karp, Laurent Mathy, Nick McKeown, Fran Spinola, Joe Touch, and Ellen Zegura. The team worked in close cooperation over a period of almost a year, exchanging thousands of emails (diligently archived for the benefit of next year's committee).For several of us, this was our first experience with this kind of work, and that made the task even more challenging. We would not have succeeded without help from the SIG officers, Jennifer Rexford and Tilman Wolf, and last year's General Chair, Roch Guerin, who was a precious resource for us in explaining how the process was run in the past.