@inproceedings {Ede2015a, title = {Towards a Middlebox Policy Taxonomy: Path Impairments}, booktitle = {International Workshop on Network Science for Communication Networks (NetSciCom)}, year = {2015}, month = {04/2015}, abstract = {

Recent years have seen the rise of middleboxes, such as firewalls, NATs, proxies,\ or Deep Packet Inspectors. Those middleboxes play an important role in today{\textquoteright}s\ Internet, including enterprise networks and cellular networks. However, despite\ their huge success in modern network architecture, they have a negative impact\ on the Internet evolution as they can slow down the TCP protocol evolution and its\ extensions. Making available a summary of the potential middlebox network\ interferences is of the highest importance as it could allow researchers to\ confront their new transport protocol to potential issues caused by middleboxes.\ And, consequently, allowing again innovation in the Internet.

This is exactly what we tackle in this paper. We propose a path impairment\ oriented middlebox taxonomy that aims at categorizing the initial purpose of a\ middlebox policy as well as its potential unexpected complications. Based on a\ measurement campaign on IPv4 and IPv6 networks, we confront our taxonomy to the\ real world. Our dataset is freely available.

}, keywords = {classification, IPv6, middleboxes, path impairment, tracebox}, author = {Korian Edeline and Benoit Donnet} } @inproceedings {Thi2015a, title = {Tracking Middleboxes in the Mobile World with TraceboxAndroid}, booktitle = {7th International Workshop on Traffic Monitoring and Analysis (TMA)}, year = {2015}, month = {04/2015}, abstract = {

Middleboxes are largely deployed over cellular networks. It is known that they\ might disrupt network performance, expose users to security issues, and harm\ protocols deployability. Further, hardly any network measurements tools for\ smartphones are able to infer middlebox behaviors, specially if one cannot\ control both ends of a path. In this paper, we present TraceboxAndroid a
proof-of-concept measurement application for Android mobile devices\ implementing the tracebox algorithm. It aims at diagnosing middlebox-impaired\ paths by detecting and locating rewriting middleboxes. We analyze a dataset\ sample to highlight the range of opportunities offered by TraceboxAndroid. We\ show that TraceboxAndroid can be useful for mobile users as well as for the
research community.

}, keywords = {Android, tracebox}, author = {Valentin Thirion and Korian Edeline and Benoit Donnet} } @inproceedings {DR:TMA-15, title = {Zen and the art of network troubleshooting: a hands on experimental study}, booktitle = {Traffic Monitoring and Analysis}, year = {2015}, abstract = {

Growing network complexity necessitates tools and methodologies to automate network troubleshooting. In this paper, we follow a crowd-sourcing trend, and argue for the need to deploy measurement probes at end-user devices and gateways, which can be under the control of the users or the ISP. Depending on the amount of information available to the probes (e.g., ISP topology), we formalize the network troubleshooting task as either a clustering or a classification problem, that we solve with an algorithm that (i) achieves perfect classification under the assumption of a strategic selection of probes (e.g., assisted by an ISP) and (ii) operates blindly with respect to the network performance metrics, of which we consider delay and bandwidth in this paper. While previous work on network troubleshooting privileges a more theoretical vs practical approaches, our workflow balances both aspects as (i) we conduct a set of controlled experiments with a rigorous and reproducible methodology, (ii) on an emulator that we thoroughly calibrate, (iii) contrasting experimental results affected by real-world noise with expected results from a probabilistic model.

}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi15tma.pdf}, author = {Espinet, Fran{\c c}ois and Joumblatt, Diana and Rossi, Dario} } @inproceedings {Cas2014e, title = {Characterizing Microsoft Lync Online in Mobile Networks: a Quality of Experience Perspective}, booktitle = {3rd IEEE International Conference on Cloud Networking}, year = {2014}, month = {10/2014}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Luxembourg, Luxembourg}, abstract = {

Cloud-based systems are gaining enormous popularity due to a number of promised benefits, including ease of deployment and administration, scalability and flexibility, and costs savings. However, as more personal and business applications migrate to the Cloud, the service quality becomes an important differentiator between providers. ISPs, Cloud providers and enterprises migrating their services to the Cloud must therefore understand the network requirements to ensure proper end-user Quality of Experience (QoE) in these services. This paper addresses the problem of QoE in Telepresence and Remote Collaboration (TRC) services provided by Microsoft Lync Online (MLO). MLO is a Cloud-based service providing online meeting capabilities including videoconferencing, audio calls, and desktop sharing, and has become the default system for TRC in enterprise scenarios. We present a complete study of the QoE undergone by 44 MLO users in controlled subjective lab tests. The study is performed on three different interactive scenarios running on top of the real MLO Cloud service, additionally shaping the Lync flows at the access network to influence the participants experience. The scenarios include audioconferencing, videoconferencing, and remote collaboration though desktop sharing. By passively monitoring the end-to-end QoS achieved by the Lync flows, and correlating it with the QoE feedbacks provided by the participants, this study permits to better understand the interplays between network performance and QoE in TRC Cloud services. In addition, we provide a network-level characterization of the traffic generated by MLO, as well as an overview on the infrastructure hosting MLO servers.

}, keywords = {Audioconferencing, Cloud QoE, Distributed Data Center, Microsoft Lync Online, MOS, Remote Desktop Sharing, Telepresence, Videoconferencing}, author = {Pedro Casas and Andreas Sackl and Sebastian Egger and Raimund Schatz} } @inproceedings {Ale2013, title = {Is There a Case for Mobile Phone Content Pre-staging?}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (Best Short Paper Award)}, year = {2013}, month = {12/2013}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, abstract = {

Content caching is a fundamental building block of the Internet. Caches are widely deployed at network edges to improve performance for end-users, and to reduce load on web servers and the backbone network. Considering mobile 3G/4G networks, however, the bottleneck is at the access link, where bandwidth is shared among all mobile terminals. As such, per-user capacity cannot grow to cope with the traffic demand. Unfortunately, caching policies would not reduce the load on the wireless link which would have to carry multiple copies of the same object that is being downloaded by multiple mobile terminals sharing the same access link.

In this paper we investigate if it is worth to push the caching paradigm even farther. We hypothesize a system in which mobile terminals implement a local cache, where popular content can be pushed/pre-staged. This exploits the peculiar broadcast capability of the wireless channels to replicate content "for free" on all terminals, saving the cost of transmitting multiple copies of those popular objects. Relying on a large data set collected from a European mobile carrier, we analyse the content popularity characteristics of mobile traffic, and quantify the benefit that the push-to-mobile system would produce. We found that content pre-staging, by proactively and periodically broadcasting "bundles" of popular objects to devices, allows to both greatly i) improve users{\textquoteright} performance and ii) reduce up to 20\% (40\%) the downloaded volume (number of requests) in optimistic scenarios with a bundle of 100 MB. However, some technical constraints and content characteristics could question the actual gain such system would reach in practice.

}, keywords = {content pre-staging, mobile networks}, isbn = {978-1-4503-2101-3}, doi = {10.1145/2535372.2535414}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2535372.2535414}, author = {Finamore, Alessandro and Mellia, Marco and Gilani, Zafar and Papagiannaki, Konstantina and Erramilli, Vijay and Grunenberger, Yan} }