The organization of ITC 21 has set up two best paper awards to acknowledge the scientific quality of the best contributions. Both awards will be offered both on the scientific quality of the paper and the oral presentation of the contribution.

• Best Paper Award: This award is granted to the best contribution being presented during ITC 21 Congress among all contributions. The award consists of Euros 1000 and an award certificate.

  The best Paper Award of ITC 21 has been confered on to Patrick Brown (Orange Labs, France) for the paper entitled "A New Statistical Approach to Estimate Global File Populations in the eDonkey P2P File Sharing System", co-authored with Sanja Petrovic (Orange Labs, France).

• ITC International Student Paper Award: This award is conferred to the best paper whose first author is a  full-time student at the time of submission and which is presented by the student himself. The author must indicate her/his participation to this competition at the time of submission, so as to be potentially considered by the TPC. From the accepted  papers, a list of semi-finalists whas been selected by the TPC. The lead student author of each selected paper must be present at the congress to give the oral presentation of the paper. A Jury designates then the recipient of the award after all presentations have been made.
  The award consists of Euros 650 and a award certificate.
  This Award is sponsored by the ITC-20 Ottawa Organizing Committee, as part of the support to ITC by the Canadian Teletraffic Community

  The best Student Paper Award of ITC 21 has been confered on to Jarno Nousiainen (TKK, Finland) for the paper entitled "Maximum Weight Independent Sets in an Infinite Plane", co-authored with Jorma Virtamo and Pasi Lassila (TKK, Finland).