COMM

While the networking literature is replete with work on managing and operating networks---from the specifics of protocols to the design of management tools and architectures---there is comparatively little work on planning a network to be rolled out. In ...

Our mobile devices regularly encounter and connect to multiple networks to maintain seamless connectivity. While this enables a variety of services we increasingly rely on, these ubiquitous network connections raise a number of important concerns. Our ...

Despite the popularity of recommendation services (such as Yelp, Healthgrades, and Angie’s List), for a majority of entities listed on these services, one has to rely on opinions shared by a few users. We argue that this paucity of reviews for most ...

Most unwritten languages today have no known grammar, and are rather governed by ``unspoken rules''. Similarly, we think that the young discipline of networking is still a practice that lacks a deep understanding of the rules that govern it. This ...

Network functions (NFs), like firewall, NAT, IDS, have been widely deployed in today’s modern networks. However, currently there is no standard specification or modeling language that can accurately describe the complexity and diversity of different ...

Updating a large network deployment is a dangerous process. Regardless of whether the operation is a switch BGP configuration change or a network-wide SDN controller upgrade, misconfigurations and bugs can potentially cause network outages and downtime ...

With the tremendous popularity gained by container technology, many applications are being containerized: splitting into numerous containers connected by networks. However, current container networking solutions have either bad performance or poor ...

Resource management problems in systems and networking often manifest as difficult online decision making tasks where appropriate solutions depend on understanding the workload and environment. Inspired by recent advances in deep reinforcement learning ...

In this paper, we make a case for a redundancy-aware network stack (RANS) for data centers. In RANS, applications expose information about replicas to the network, which in turn, uses duplicate requests to improve performance of typical applications by ...

With the growing size of data center networks, full-bandwidth connectivity between all pairs of servers is becoming difficult and expensive to scale. Thus, numerous recent topology proposals incorporate reconfigurable wireless and optical connectivity, ...

Clos networks are easy to implement, whereas random graphs have good performance. We propose flat-tree, a convertible data center network architecture, to combine the best of both worlds. Flat-tree can change the network topology dynamically, so the ...

The bandwidth and latency requirements of next-generation datacenter networks stress the limits of CMOS manufacturing. A key trend in their design will be a move from single-channel links and switches to multi-channel links and switches. Today's network ...

The recently emerging Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) data center networks rely on layer-2 flow control in order to support packet loss sensitive transport protocols, such as RDMA and FCoE. Although lossless networks were proven to improve end-to-end ...

Driven by the need for ultra-low latency, high throughput and low CPU overhead, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is being deployed by many cloud providers. To deploy RDMA in Ethernet networks, Priority-based Flow Control (PFC) must be used. PFC, ...

Testing and debugging networks /in situ/ is notoriously difficult. Many vital correctness properties involve histories over multiple packets (e.g., prior established connections). Checking such properties requires /cross-packet state/, which cannot be ...

Programmable switches potentially make it easier to perform flexible network monitoring queries at line rate, and scalable stream processors make it possible to fuse data streams to answer more sophisticated queries about the network in real-time. ...

For Internet Service Provider (ISP) operators, getting an accurate picture of how their network behaves is challenging. Given the traffic volumes that their networks carry and the impossibility to control end-hosts, ISP operators are typically forced to ...

The reported lack of transparency of the online advertising market may seriously affect the interests of advertisers. In this paper, we present a novel methodology that allows advertisers to independently assess the quality of display advertising ...

Various trends are reshaping content delivery on the Internet: the explosive growth of traffic due to video, users' increasing expectations for higher quality of experience (QoE), and the proliferation of server capacity from a variety of sources (e.g., ...

Services offered by cloud providers (e.g., for key-value storage and for redirecting clients to nearby data centers) simplify the development of applications deployed in the cloud. However, since any cloud provider’s service offerings are far from ...

Multipath congestion control prefers sending more traffic over paths with lower loss rates. This behaviour is key to achieving resource pooling and efficiently allocating resources in multipath networks. However, loss rates can be manipulated in the ...

Many data center traffic patterns exhibit abundant concurrent connections and high churn. In the face of these characteristics, server-centric congestion control is a poor fit—each connection, no matter how small, must start from scratch when testing ...

Multi-tenant datacenters predominantly use equal-cost multipath (ECMP) routing to distribute traffic over multiple network paths. However, ECMP static hashing causes unequal load-balancing and collisions, leading to low throughput and high latencies. ...

Today's virtual reality (VR) headsets require a cable connection to a PC or game console. This cable significantly limits the player’s mobility and hence her/his VR experience. The high data rate requirement of this link (multiple Gbps) precludes its ...

Millimeter wave (mmWave) technologies promise to revolutionize wireless networks by enabling multi-gigabit data rates. However, they suffer from high attenuation, and hence have to use highly directional antennas to focus their power on the receiver. ...

Network transmissions are the cornerstone of most mobile apps today, and a main contributor to energy consumption. We use a componentized energy model to quantify energy use by device, and observe significant energy consumption by the CPU in network ...

This paper argues that the lack of explicit support for non-volatile main memory (NVMM) in network stacks fundamentally limits application performance. NVMM devices have been integrated into general-purpose OSes by providing familiar file-based ...

Diagnosing performance problems in networks is important, for example to determine where packets experience high latency or loss. However, existing performance diagnoses are constrained by limited switch mechanisms for measurement. Alternatively, ...

This paper presents SplitStack, an architecture targeted at mitigating asymmetric DDoS attacks. These attacks are particularly challenging, since attackers can use a limited amount of resources to trigger exhaustion of a particular type of system ...

Existing security mechanisms for managing the Internet infrastructural resources like IP addresses, AS numbers, BGP advertisements and DNS mappings rely on a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that can be potentially compromised by state actors and ...