mobicom-writing-style

MobiCom Writing Style

A MobiCom paper reads as a mechanism justified by measurement. The first page states a wireless or mobile-networking problem, the mechanism that addresses it, and the measured evidence — before any implementation detail. The double-column 12-page body is for the core argument; derivations, protocols, and extra results go to references and appendices.

The first-page arc

Put this in the abstract and first page, in order:

1. The wireless/mobile pain — the concrete condition that breaks existing designs (a fade under mobility, interference, a spectrum constraint, an energy limit).
2. Why existing mechanisms fall short — each prior approach gets a specific, named failure tied to the condition, not "prior work is limited."
3. The mechanism — what is new, stated as a networking/PHY-MAC/routing/sensing mechanism, with its operating regime named (distance, mobility, channel, power).
4. The measured evidence — the headline result with its condition and its uncertainty, not a bare "up to N×."
5. Why it matters for mobile networking — the community-level payoff.

See ../../resources/worked-examples/01-introduction.md for a before→after that executes this arc.

Name the operating regime

The single most common wireless-writing failure is a claim with an unstated envelope. Every headline claim carries its regime:

A reviewer cannot fault — or reward — a claim whose conditions are hidden. Stating the regime is not hedging; it is the claim.

Claims are paired with evidence

Every major claim maps to a proof, a figure, a measured condition, or a reproducibility location. Build the map before submitting:

Claim -> evidence pairing (fill for each headline sentence):
  "decodable through fades"  -> Fig. 3 (delivery vs walker path) + channel traces
  "within energy budget"     -> Fig. 4 (energy-per-bit) + instrument note (App. B)
  "no dedicated carrier"     -> system description Sec. 3 + power measurement
An unpaired claim is either cut or demoted to future work.

Percentiles, not superlatives

• Report distributions and confidence intervals, not single best runs or unqualified maxima. "Up to N×" without the spread behind it is a review risk (mobicom-experiments).
• Prefer the median and a tail over the mean alone when the metric is delivery or latency; wireless distributions are skewed.
• Avoid "significantly" as prose; show the interval and let it speak.

Fitting the double-column 12 pages

• Figures and tables count against the 12; a radio-testbed diagram and three CDFs is real page budget. Triage content, never geometry (mobicom-submission).
• The body carries the mechanism and its headline evidence; channel-model derivations, full protocols, extended sweeps, and instrument details go to appendices after the references, outside the cap (mobicom-supplementary).
• Keep the introduction's roadmap to one or two sentences; over-signposting substitutes for argument.
• Do not put the strongest result only in an appendix — reviewers should not reconstruct the contribution from supplementary material.

Prose discipline

• Lead sections with the finding, then the method — not a chronological lab diary.
• Name the abstraction or mechanism once and use the name consistently.
• Separate engineering effort from research contribution: building a testbed is work, but the contribution is the mechanism it demonstrates.

Revision checklist

• Mechanism and operating regime on the first page.
• Each prior-work line has a specific, named failure.
• Every headline claim paired to a figure, condition, or appendix.
• Distributions/intervals replace superlatives throughout.
• Figures/tables budgeted against the 12 double-column pages.
• Strongest result in the body, not only the appendix.

Output format

[First page] mechanism + regime present? y/n — what is missing
[Regime] which headline claims lack a stated envelope
[Claim map] unpaired claims listed for cut-or-support
[Superlatives] flagged phrases -> distribution/interval replacement
[Page budget] over/under 12; what to move to appendix