Super interesting but not widely known topic (afaik):
IPv4 address scarcity.
An IPv4 address is 32 bit long, so there are ~4 billion possible addresses. There are about 4 billion people connecting to the Internet, numbers growing. Most regional registries have run out of new addresses to assign years ago.
So how are these virtual goods of IPv4 addresses managed, and what effects does this scarcity have?
Some research on it by my colleague Philipp Richter and others:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.2649.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.00360.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.6858.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.05606 (Especially interesting imho: Carrier-grade NAT)
There should be more, and also research on the regional disparity, also from social sciences, economics...
How come network operators in the US have more address space available than in other regions? How does this influence their management strategies and what technology they deploy? Should addresses be redistributed? If so, how?
Could large-scale Carrier Grade NATs influence user experience in practice, e.g., your ISP selling you "Internet" limited to 256 concurrent sessions?
Anyone? :D