@article {Cas2016, title = {Unveiling Network and Service Performance Degradation in the Wild with mPlane}, journal = {IEEE Communications Magazine - Network Testing Series}, year = {2016}, abstract = {

Unveiling network and service performance issues in complex and highly decentralized systems such as the Internet is a major challenge. Indeed, the Internet is based on decentralization and diversity. However, its distributed nature leads to operational brittleness and difficulty in identifying the root causes of performance degradation. In such a context, network measurements are a fundamental pillar to shed light and to unveil design and implementation defects. To tackle this fragmentation and visibility problem, we have recently conceived mPlane, a distributed measurement platform which runs, collects and analyses traffic measurements to study the operation and functioning of the Internet. In this paper, we show the potentiality of the mPlane approach to unveil network and service degradation issues in live, operational networks, involving both fixed-line and cellular networks. In particular, we combine active and passive measurements to troubleshoot problems in end-customer Internet access connections, or to automatically detect and diagnose anomalies in Internet-scale services (e.g., YouTube) which impact a large number of end-users.

}, author = {Pedro Casas and Pierdomenico Fiadino and Sarah Wassermann and Stefano Traverso and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and Edion Tego and Francesco Matera and Marco Mellia} } @inproceedings {Cas2015a, title = {On the Analysis of QoE in Cellular Networks: from Subjective Tests to Large-scale Traffic Measurements}, booktitle = {6th International Workshop on Traffic Analysis and Characterization (TRAC)}, year = {2015}, author = {Pedro Casas and Martin Varela and Pierdomenico Fiadino and Mirko Schiavone and Helena Rivas and Raimund Schatz} } @inproceedings {DR:AIMS-15, title = {Anycast census and geolocation}, booktitle = {7th Workshop on Active Internet Measurements (AIMS 2015)}, year = {2015}, month = {April 2015}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi15aims.pdf}, author = {Cicalese, Danilo and Auge, Jordan and Joumblatt, Diana and Rossi, Dario and Friedman, Timur} } @inproceedings {Faat1510:Cautious, title = {A Cautious Look at Using Internet Standards-to-be in Research Work}, booktitle = {2015 IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications and Networking (CSCN) (CSCN{\textquoteright}15)}, year = {2015}, address = {Tokyo, Japan}, abstract = {

Standardization of Internet protocols is usually a somewhat slow process. The reasons for this are manifold. Besides working out the protocol details, things like opposing stakeholder interests can prolong the consensus building process, new requirements might be introduced that require technical changes to the protocol, coordination across standards developing organizations (SDOs) might add delays just to name a few. For potential users of a standard-to-be, the time to specify and implement it often stalls progress on projects which could have been finished far earlier using proprietary - but ultimately non-interoperable - implementations. For research work, interoperability is however not always an important concern. The overhead and delay of an SDO in these cases is typically a hard to calculate risk for a research project. It represents an external dependency for the work but there is only a finite amount of funding and time to finish the project. On the other hand, using standardized technology increases the likelihood that the output of the project is being used by external parties after the lifetime of a research project and the implementation experience can be valuable input to the standardization process. In this paper, we analyze the lifecycle of recent Internet standards to provide researchers an insight into the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standardization process duration. We evaluate different areas, document phases, working groups and other aspects of the standardization process. This allows researchers to better judge whether they want to employ standards-to-be in research work or engage with the IETF to specify protocols based on research prototypes.

}, keywords = {document lifecycle, ietf, RFCs}, author = {Michael Faath and Rolf Winter and Fabian Weisshaar} } @inproceedings {Fia2015b, title = {Challenging Entropy-based Anomaly Detection and Diagnosis in Cellular Networks}, booktitle = {ACM SIGCOMM}, year = {2015}, author = {Pierdomenico Fiadino and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and Mirko Schiavone and Pedro Casas} } @inproceedings {DR:CoNEXT-15, title = {Characterizing IPv4 Anycast Adoption and Deployment}, booktitle = {ACM CoNEXT}, year = {2015}, month = {12/2015}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {Heidelberg, DE}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi15conext.pdf}, author = {Cicalese, Danilo and Auge, Jordan and Joumblatt, Diana and Friedman, Tim ur and Rossi, Dario} } @article {D61, title = {Demonstration Plan}, number = {D6.1}, year = {2015}, month = {01/2015}, type = {Public Deliverable}, issn = {D6.1}, author = {Pedro Casas and Edion Tego and Francesco Matera and Maurizio Dusi and A. Bakay and Balazs Szabo and G. Rozsa and Stefano Traverso and Ilias Leontiadis and L. Baltrunas and Yan Grunenberger and Andrea Fregosi and A. Kahveci and Eike Kowallik and G. Mattellini and C. Meregalli and Stefano Raffaglio and M. Russo and Andrea Sannino and M. Scarpino} } @inproceedings {Pap2015a, title = {Distributed Monitoring Problem}, booktitle = {7th International Network Optimization Conference (INOC) 2015}, year = {2015}, author = {Dimitri Papadimitriou and Bernard Fortz} } @inproceedings {TrKu15, title = {Enabling Internet-Wide Deployment of Explicit Congestion Notification}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2015 Passive and Active Measurement Conference}, year = {2015}, month = {03/2015}, address = {New York}, abstract = {

\ac{ECN} is an TCP/IP extension to signal network congestion without packet loss, which has barely seen deployment though it was standardized and implemented more than a decade ago. On-going activities in research and standardization aim to make the usage of \ac{ECN} more beneficial. This measurement study provides an update on deployment status and newly assesses the marginal risk of enabling \ac{ECN} negotiation by default on client end-systems. Additionally, we dig deeper into causes of connectivity and negotiation issues linked to \ac{ECN}. We find that about five websites per thousand suffer additional connection setup latency when fallback per RFC 3168 is correctly implemented; we provide a patch for Linux to properly perform this fallback. Moreover, we detect and explore a number of cases in which \ac{ECN} brokenness is clearly path-dependent, i.e. on middleboxes beyond the access or content provider network. Further analysis of these cases can guide their elimination, further reducing the risk of enabling \ac{ECN} by default.

}, author = {Brian Trammell and Mirja K{\"u}hlewind and Damiano Boppart and Iain Learmonth and Gorry Fairhurst and Richard Scheffenegger} } @inproceedings {TrKuPAM15, title = {Enabling Internet-Wide Deployment of Explicit Congestion Notification}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2015 Passive and Active Measurement Conference}, year = {2015}, month = {Mar}, address = {New York}, url = {http://ecn.ethz.ch/ecn-pam15.pdf}, author = {Brian Trammell and Mirja K{\"u}hlewind and Damiano Boppart and Iain Learmonth and Gorry Fairhurst and Richard Scheffenegger} } @inproceedings {DR:INFOCOM-15a, title = {A Fistful of Pings: Accurate and Lightweight Anycast Enumeration and Geolocation}, booktitle = {IEEE INFOCOM}, year = {2015}, month = {04/2015}, abstract = {

Use of IP-layer anycast has increased in the last few years: once relegated to DNS root and top-level domain servers, anycast is now commonly used to assist distribution of general purpose content by CDN providers. Yet, the measurement techniques for discovering anycast replicas have been designed around DNS, limiting their usefulness to this particular service. This raises the need for protocol agnostic methodologies, that should additionally be as lightweight as possible in order to scale up anycast service discovery. This is precisely the aim of this paper, which proposes a new method for exhaustive and accurate enumeration and city-level geolocation of anycast instances, requiring only a handful of latency measurements from a set of known vantage points. Our method exploits an iterative workflow that enumerates (an optimization problem) and geolocates (a classification problem) anycast replicas. We thoroughly validate our methodology on available ground truth (several DNS root servers), using multiple measurement infrastructures (PlanetLab, RIPE), obtaining extremely accurate results (even with simple algorithms, that we compare with the global optimum), that we make available to the scientific community. Compared to the state of the art work that appeared in INFOCOM 2013 and IMC 2013, our technique (i) is not bound to a specific protocol, (ii) requires 1000 times fewer vantage points, not only (iii) achieves over 50\% recall but also (iv) accurately identifies the city-level geolocation for over 78\% of the enumerated servers, with (v) a mean geolocation error of 361 km for all enumerated servers.

}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi15infocom.pdf}, author = {Cicalese, Danilo and Joumblatt, Diana and Rossi, Dario and Buob, Marc-Olivier and Auge, Jordan and Friedman, Timur} } @inproceedings {Faa2015a, title = {A GLIMPSE of the Internet{\textquoteright}s Fabric}, booktitle = {International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools}, year = {2015}, month = {12/2015}, address = {Berlin}, author = {Michael Faath and Rolf Winter} } @inproceedings {DR:TRAC-15, title = {Impact of Carrier-Grade NAT on Web Browsing}, booktitle = { 6th International Workshop on TRaffic Analysis and Characterization (TRAC) - The paper won the BEST PAPER award}, year = {2015}, month = {08/2015}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Dobrovnik, Croatia}, abstract = {

Public IPv4 addresses are a scarce resource. While IPv6 adoption is lagging, Network Address Translation (NAT) technologies have been deployed over the last years to alleviate IPv4 exiguity and their high rental cost. In particular, Carrier- Grade NAT (CGN) is a well known solution to mask a whole ISP network behind a limited amount of public IP addresses, significantly reducing expenses. Despite its economical benefits, CGN can introduce connectiv- ity issues which have sprouted a considerable effort in research, development and standardization. However, to the best of our knowledge, little effort has been dedicated to investigate the impact that CGN deployment may have on users{\textquoteright} traffic. This paper fills the gap. We leverage passive measurements from an ISP network deploying CGN and, by means of the Jensen- Shannon divergence, we contrast several performance metrics considering customers being offered public or private addresses. In particular, we gauge the impact of CGN presence on users{\textquoteright} web browsing experience. Our results testify that CGN is a mature and stable technology as, if properly deployed, it does not harm users{\textquoteright} web browsing experience. Indeed, while our analysis lets emerge expected stochastic differences of certain indexes (e.g., the difference in the path hop count), the measurements related to the quality of users{\textquoteright} browsing are otherwise unperturbed. Interestingly, we also observe that CGN protects customers from unsolicited, often malicious, traffic.

}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi15trac.pdf}, author = {Bocchi, Enrico and Safari, Ali and Traverso, Stefano and Finamore, Alessandro and Di Gennaro, Valeria and Mellia, Marco and Munafo, Maurizio and Rossi, Dario} } @inproceedings {7249283, title = {Lagrangian relaxation for the time-dependent combined network design and routing problem}, booktitle = {Communications (ICC), 2015 IEEE International Conference on}, year = {2015}, month = {June}, publisher = {IEEE XPlore}, organization = {IEEE XPlore}, address = {London, United-Kingdom}, keywords = {allocation planning process, flow conservation constraints, integer programming, integer programming methods, Lagrangian relaxation, linear programming, Maintenance engineering, multi-commodity capacitated fixed charge network design, network routing problem, Optimization, Quality of Service, Reliability, resource allocation, resource installation, Resource management, Routing, routing decision process, telecommunication network routing, telecommunication traffic, time-dependent combined network design, traffic demands}, doi = {10.1109/ICC.2015.7249283}, author = {Dimitri Papadimitriou and Bernard Fortz and Enrico Gorgone} } @inproceedings {DR:INFOCOM-15b, title = {A Lightweight Anycast Enumeration and Geolocation}, booktitle = {IEEE INFOCOM, Demo Session}, year = {2015}, address = {Hong Kong, China}, abstract = {

Several Internet services such as CDNs, DNS name servers, and sinkholes use IP-layer anycast to reduce user response times and increase robustness with respect to network failures and denial of service attacks. However, current geolocation tools fail with anycast IP addresses. In our recent work [1], we remedy to this by developing an anycast detection, enumeration, and geolocation technique based on a set of delay measurements from a handful of geographically distributed vantage points. The technique (i) detects if an IP is anycast, (ii) enumerates replicas by finding the maximum set of non-overlapping disks (i.e., areas centered around vantage points), and (iii) geolocates the replicas by solving a classification problem and assigning the server location to the most likely city. We propose to demo this technique. In particular, we visually show how to detect an anycast IP, enumerate its replicas, and geolocate them on a map. The demo allows to browse previously geolocated services, as well as to explore new targets on demand.

}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi15infocom-b.pdf}, author = {Cicalese, Danilo and Joumblatt, Diana and Rossi, Dario and Buob, Marc-Olivier and Auge, Jordan and Friedman, Timur} } @inproceedings {Faa2015, title = {Measurements with the Masses}, booktitle = {IRTF \& ISOC Research and Applications of Internet Measurements (RAIM) Workshop}, year = {2015}, address = {Yokohama, Japan}, author = {Michael Faath and Rolf Winter} } @inproceedings {7145326, title = {Online Social Networks anatomy: On the analysis of Facebook and WhatsApp in cellular networks}, booktitle = {IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking), 2015}, year = {2015}, month = {May}, keywords = {Cellular Networks, Content Delivery Networks, Europe, Facebook, Internet, IP networks, Network Measurements, Online Social Networks, Organizations, Servers, WhatsApp}, doi = {10.1109/IFIPNetworking.2015.7145326}, author = {Fiadino, Pierdomenico and Casas, Pedro and Schiavone, Mirko and D{\textquoteright}Alconzo, Alessandro} } @inproceedings {Cas2015, title = {QoMOSN - On the Analysis of Traffic and Quality of Experience in Mobile Online Social Networks}, booktitle = {European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC)}, year = {2015}, author = {Pedro Casas and Pierdomenico Fiadino and Mirko Schiavone} } @article {Wei2014, title = {Rating Network Paths for Locality-Aware Overlay Construction and Routing}, journal = {IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking}, volume = {23}, year = {2015}, month = {10/2015}, chapter = {1661}, abstract = {

This paper investigates the rating of network paths,\ i.e. acquiring quantized measures of path properties such as\ round-trip time and available bandwidth. Comparing to finegrained\ measurements, coarse-grained ratings are appealing in\ that they are not only informative but also cheap to obtain.

Motivated by this insight, we firstly address the scalable\ acquisition of path ratings by statistical inference. By observing\ similarities to recommender systems, we examine the applicability\ of solutions to recommender system and show that our\ inference problem can be solved by a class of matrix factorization\ techniques. A technical contribution is an active and progressive\ inference framework that not only improves the accuracy by\ selectively measuring more informative paths but also speeds\ up the convergence for available bandwidth by incorporating its\ measurement methodology.

Then, we investigate the usability of rating-based network\ measurement and inference in applications. A case study is\ performed on whether locality awareness can be achieved for\ overlay networks of Pastry and BitTorrent using inferred ratings.

We show that such coarse-grained knowledge can improve the\ performance of peer selection and that finer granularities do not\ always lead to larger improvements.

}, keywords = {matrix factorization, network inference, rating-based network measurement, recommender system}, author = {Du, Wei and Liao, Yongjun and Tao, Narisu and Geurts, Pierre and Fu, Xiaoming and Leduc, Guy} } @inproceedings {Fia2015a, title = {RCATool - A Framework for Detecting and Diagnosing Anomalies in Cellular Networks}, booktitle = {27th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC)}, year = {2015}, author = {Pierdomenico Fiadino and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and Mirko Schiavone and Pedro Casas} } @inproceedings {7325228, title = {Robust cooperative monitoring problem}, booktitle = {Reliable Networks Design and Modeling (RNDM), 2015 7th International Workshop on}, year = {2015}, month = {10/2015}, keywords = {box+ellipsoidal perturbation set, box+polyhedral perturbation set, cooperative communication, integer programming, linear programming, MILP, Minimization, mixed-integer linear program, Monitoring, Optimization, passive monitoring point configuration, passive monitoring point placement, robust cooperative monitoring problem, Robustness, Routing, telecommunication traffic, time-varying traffic flow monitoring, Topology, Uncertainty}, doi = {10.1109/RNDM.2015.7325228}, author = {Dimitri Papadimitriou and Bernard Fortz} } @inproceedings {D.2015, title = {Robust cooperative monitoring problem}, booktitle = {Reliable Networks Design and Modeling (RNDM), 2015 7th International Workshop on}, year = {2015}, month = {Oct}, keywords = {box+ellipsoidal perturbation set, box+polyhedral perturbation set, cooperative communication, integer programming, linear programming, MILP, Minimization, mixed-integer linear program, Monitoring, Optimization, passive monitoring point configuration, passive monitoring point placement, robust cooperative monitoring problem, Robustness, Routing, telecommunication traffic, time-varying traffic flow monitoring, Topology, Uncertainty}, doi = {10.1109/RNDM.2015.7325228}, author = {Papadimitriou, D. and Fortz, B.} } @inproceedings {D.P2015, title = {Robust Cooperative Monitoring Problem}, booktitle = {7th International Workshop on Reliable Networks Design and Modeling (RNDM) 2015}, year = {2015}, month = {10/2015}, publisher = {IEEE XPlore}, organization = {IEEE XPlore}, address = {Munich, Germany}, author = {Dimitri Papadimitriou and Bernard Fortz} } @inproceedings {Hou2015, title = {A Study of the Impact of DNS Resolvers on Performance Using a Causal Approach}, booktitle = {Internet Teletraffic Congress}, year = {2015}, month = {08/2015}, address = {Ghent, Belgium}, abstract = {For a user to access any resource on the Internet, it is necessary to first locate a server hosting the requested resource. The Domain Name System service (DNS) represents the first step in this process, translating a human readable name, the resource host name, into an IP address. With the expansion of Content Distribution Networks (CDNs), the DNS service has seen its importance increase. In a CDN, objects are replicated on different servers to decrease the distance from the client to a server hosting the object that needs to be accessed. The DNS service should improve user experience by directing its demand to the optimal CDN server. While most of the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer a DNS service to their customers, it is now common to see clients using a public DNS service instead. This choice may have an impact on Web browsing performance. In this paper we study the impact of choosing one DNS server instead of another and we compare the performance of a large European ISP DNS service with the one of a public DNS service, Google DNS. We propose a causal approach to expose the structural dependencies of the different parameters impacted by the DNS service used and we show how to model these dependencies with a Bayesian network. This model allows us to explain and quantify the benefits obtained by clients using their ISP DNS service and to propose a solution to further improve their performance.}, keywords = {DNS, reasoner}, author = {Hadrien Hours and Ernst Biersack and Patrick Loiseau and Alessandro Finamore and Marco Mellia} } @inproceedings {Fia2015, title = {Towards Automatic Detection and Diagnosis of Internet Service Anomalies via DNS Traffic Analysis}, booktitle = {6th International Workshop on Traffic Analysis and Characterization (TRAC)}, year = {2015}, author = {Pierdomenico Fiadino and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and Mirko Schiavone and Pedro Casas} } @inproceedings {Pie2015, title = {Vivisecting WhatsApp in Cellular Networks: Servers, Flows, and Quality of Experience}, booktitle = {Traffic Monitoring and Analysis}, year = {2015}, publisher = {Springer International Publishing}, organization = {Springer International Publishing}, keywords = {Cellular Networks, Large-Scale Measurements, Quality of Experience, Traffic characterization, WhatsApp}, isbn = {978-3-319-17171-5}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-17172-2_4}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17172-2_4}, author = {Fiadino, Pierdomenico and Schiavone, Mirko and Casas, Pedro} } @article {Dus2014a, title = {Algorithm and Scheduler Design and Implementation}, year = {2014}, month = {09/2014}, keywords = {algorithm design, job scheduler, mPlane software, repository tools}, isbn = {D3.3}, issn = {D3.3}, author = {Maurizio Dusi and Saverio Niccolini and Sofia Nikitaki and Daniele Apiletti and Elena Baralis and Alessandro Finamore and Luigi Grimaudo and Stefano Traverso and Francesco Matera and Edion Tego and V, Guchev and Zied Ben Houidi and Pietro Michiardi and Marco Milanesio and YiXi Gong and Dario Rossi and Ilias Leontiadis and G, Dimopoulos and Tivadar Szemethy and A, Bakay and Arian B{\"a}r and Pedro Casas and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and Pierdomenico Fiadino} } @inproceedings {Cas2014d, title = {On the Analysis of QoE-based Performance Degradation in YouTube Traffic}, booktitle = {10th International Conference on Network and Service Management, CNSM 2014}, year = {2014}, month = {11/2014}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Rio de Janeiro, Brazil}, abstract = {

YouTube is the most popular service in today{\textquoteright}s Internet. Google relies on its massive Content Delivery Network (CDN) to push YouTube videos as close as possible to the end-users to improve their Quality of Experience (QoE), as well as to pursue its own optimization goals. Adopting space and time variant traffic delivery policies, Google servers handle users{\textquoteright} requests from multiple geo-distributed locations at different times. Such traffic delivery policies can have a relevant impact on the traffic routed through the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) providing the access, but most importantly, they can have negative effects on the end-user QoE. In this paper we shed light on the problem of diagnosing QoE-based performance degradation events in YouTube{\textquoteright}s traffic. Through the analysis of one month of YouTube flow traces collected at the network of a large European ISP, we particularly identify and drill down a Google{\textquoteright}s CDN server selection policy negatively impacting the watching experience of YouTube users during several days at peak-load times. The analysis combines both the user-side perspective and the CDN perspective of the end-to-end YouTube delivery service to diagnose the problem. On the one hand, we rely on the monitoring of YouTube QoE-based Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to detect performance degradation events affecting the end-customers. On the other hand, we analyze the temporal behavior of the Google CDN traffic delivery policies, by tracking the activity of the Google servers providing the videos. The analysis is supported by time-series analysis, entropy-based approaches, and clustering techniques to flag the aforementioned anomaly. The main contributions of the paper are threefold: firstly, we provide a large-scale characterization of the YouTube service in terms of traffic characteristics and provisioning behavior of the Google CDN servers. Secondly, we introduce simple yet effective QoE-based KPIs to monitor YouTube videos from the end-user perspective. Finally and most important, we analyze and provide evidence of the occurrence of QoE-based YouTube anomalies induced by CDN server selection policies, which are somehow normally hidden from the common knowledge of the end-user. This is a main issue for ISPs, who see their reputation degrade when such events occur, even if Google is the culprit.

}, keywords = {clustering, Content Delivery Networks, Empirical Entropy, Performance Degradation, Quality of Experience, YouTube}, author = {Pedro Casas and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and Pierdomenico Fiadino and Arian B{\"a}r and Alessandro Finamore} } @inproceedings {Fia, title = {Characterizing Web Services Provisioning via CDNs: The Case of Facebook}, booktitle = {5th International Workshop on TRaffic Analysis and Characterization}, year = {2014}, month = {08/2014}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Nicosia, Cyprus}, abstract = {

Today{\textquoteright}s Internet consists of massive scale web\ services and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). This paper sheds\ light on the way major Internet-scale web services content is\ hosted and delivered. By analyzing a full month of HTTP traffic\ traces collected at the mobile network of a major European ISP,\ we characterize the paradigmatic case of Facebook, considering\ not only the traffic flows but also the main organizations and\ CDNs providing them. Our study serves the main purpose of\ better understanding how major web services are provisioned\ in today{\textquoteright}s Internet, paying special attention to the temporal\ dynamics of the service delivery and the interplays between the\ involved hosting organizations. To the best of our knowledge, this\ is the first paper providing such an analysis in mobile networks.

}, keywords = {Akamai, Content Delivery Networks, Facebook, HTTP Traffic, mobile networks}, author = {Pierdomenico Fiadino and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and Pedro Casas} } @inproceedings {Nay2014, title = {The Cost of the {\textquotedblleft}S{\textquotedblright} in HTTPS}, booktitle = {ACM Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT)}, year = {2014}, month = {12/2014}, author = {David Naylor and Alessandro Finamore and Ilias Leontiadis and Yan Grunenberger and Marco Mellia and Kostantina Papagiannaki and Peter Steenkiste} } @inproceedings {Bae2014, title = {DBStream: an Online Aggregation, Filtering and Processing System for Network Traffic Monitoring}, booktitle = {TRAC}, year = {2014}, month = {08/2014}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Nicosia, Cyprus}, author = {Arian Baer and Pedro Casas and Lukasz Golab and Alessandro Finamore} } @article {D42, title = {Design of the Reasoner}, number = {D4.2}, year = {2014}, month = {06/2014}, type = {report}, keywords = {design, private deliverable, reasoner, WP4}, issn = {D4.2}, author = {Pedro Casas and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and Maurizio Dusi and Sofia Nikitaki and Mohamed Ahmed and Stefano Traverso and Marco Mellia and Daniele Apiletti and Luigi Grimaudo and Elena Baralis and Dario Rossi and D. Joumblatt and Alessandro Capello and M. D{\textquoteright}Ambrosio and Fabrizio Invernizzi and M. Ullio and Andrea Fregosi and Eike Kowallik and Stefano Raffaglio and Andrea Sannino and Marco Milanesio and Edion Tego and Francesco Matera and Tivadar Szemethy and Balazs Szabo and L. N{\'e}meth and Zied Ben Houidi and G. Dimopoulos and Ilias Leontiadis and Yan Grunenberger and L. Baltrunas and Michael Faath and Rolf Winter and Dimitri Papadimitriou} } @inproceedings {Fia2014, title = {On the Detection of Network Traffic Anomalies in Content Delivery Network Services}, booktitle = {ITC26}, year = {2014}, month = {09/2014}, address = {Karlskrona, Sweden}, author = {Pierdomenico Fiadino and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and Arian B{\"a}r and Alessandro Finamore and Pedro Casas} } @inproceedings {Schiavone:2014:DDA:2680821.2680831, title = {Diagnosing Device-Specific Anomalies in Cellular Networks}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2014 CoNEXT on Student Workshop}, year = {2014}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, keywords = {anomaly diagnosis, cellular networks., entropy-based analysis}, isbn = {978-1-4503-3282-8}, doi = {10.1145/2680821.2680831}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2680821.2680831}, author = {Schiavone, Mirko and Romirer-Maierhofer, Peter and Fiadino, Pierdomenico and Casas, Pedro} } @inproceedings {Cas2014a, title = {Distributed active measurement of Internet queuing delays}, booktitle = {Passive and Active Measurement (PAM), Extended Abstract}, year = {2014}, month = {March}, address = {Los Angeles, USA}, abstract = {

Despite growing link capacities, over-dimensioned buffers are still causing, in the Internet of the second decade of the third millenium, hosts to suffer from severe queuing delays (or bufferbloat). While maximum bufferbloat possibly exceeds few seconds, it is far less clear how often this maximum is hit in practice. This paper reports on our ongoing work to build a spatial and temporal map of Internet bufferbloat, describing a system based on distributed agents running on PlanetLab that aims at providing a quantitative answer to the above question.

}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi14pam-b.pdf}, author = {P. Casoria and D Rossi and Jordan Aug{\'e} and Marc-Oliver Buob and T. Friedman and A. Pescape} } @inproceedings {Tra2014b, title = {Exploiting Hybrid Measurements for Network Troubleshooting}, booktitle = {IEEE Networks}, year = {2014}, month = {09/2014}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Funchal, PT}, abstract = {Network measurements are a fundamental pillar to understand network performance and perform root cause analysis in case of problems. Traditionally, either active or passive measurements are considered. While active measurements allow to know exactly the workload injected by the application into the network, the passive measurements can offer a more detailed view of transport and network layer impacts. In this paper, we present a hybrid approach in which active throughput measurements are regularly run while a passive measurement tool monitors the generated packets. This allows us to correlate the application layer measurements obtained by the active tool with the more detailed view offered by the passive monitor. The proposed methodology has been implemented following the mPlane reference architecture, tools have been installed in the Fastweb network, and we collect measurements for more than three months. We report then a subset of results that show the benefits obtained when correlating active and passive measurements. Among results, we pinpoint cases of congestion, of ADSL misconfiguration, and of modem issues that impair throughput obtained by the users.}, keywords = {Hybrid measurements, measurement analysis, WP2}, author = {Stefano Traverso and Edion Tego and Eike Kowallik and Stefano Raffaglio and Andrea Fregosi and Marco Mellia and Francesco Matera} } @inproceedings {Ben2014, title = {Gold mining in a River of Internet Content Traffic}, booktitle = {6th International Workshop on Traffic Monitoring and Analysis, TMA}, year = {2014}, month = {04/2014}, publisher = {Springer}, organization = {Springer}, address = {London}, abstract = {With the advent of Over-The-Top content providers (OTTs), Internet Service Providers (ISPs) saw their portfolio of services shrink to the low margin role of data transporters. In order to counter this effect, some ISPs started to follow big OTTs like Facebook and Google in trying to turn their data into a valuable asset. In this paper, we explore the questions of what meaningful information can be extracted from network data, and what interesting insights it can provide. To this end, we tackle the first challenge of detecting {\textquotedblleft}user-URLs{\textquotedblright}, i.e., those links that were clicked by users as opposed to those objects automatically downloaded by browsers and applications. We devise algorithms to pinpoint such URLs, and validate them on manually collected ground truth traces. We then apply them on a three-day long traffic trace spanning more than 19,000 residential users that generated around 190 million HTTP transactions. We find that only 1.6\% of these observed URLs were actually clicked by users. As a first application for our methods, we answer the question of which platforms participate most in promoting the Internet content. Surprisingly, we find that, despite its notoriety, only 11\% of the user URL visits are coming from Google Search. }, keywords = {Content mining, HTTP Traffic, URL extraction}, author = {Zied Ben-Houidi and Giuseppe Scavo and Samir Ghamri-Doudane and Alessandro Finamore and Stefano Traverso and Marco Mellia} } @inproceedings {Bae2014a, title = {Large-Scale Network Traffic Monitoring with DBStream, a System for Rolling Big Data Analysis}, booktitle = {International Conference on Big Data, IEEE BigData}, year = {2014}, month = {11/2014}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Washington D.C., USA}, abstract = {

The complexity of the Internet has rapidly increased, making it more important and challenging to design scalable network monitoring tools. Network monitoring typically requires rolling data analysis, i.e., continuously and incrementally updating (rolling-over) various reports and statistics over high-volume data streams. In this paper, we describe DBStream, which is an SQL-based system that explicitly supports incremental queries for rolling data analysis. We also present a performance comparison of DBStream with a parallel data processing engine (Spark), showing that, in some scenarios, a single DBStream node can outperform a cluster of ten Spark nodes on rolling network monitoring workloads. Although our performance evaluation is based on network monitoring data, our results can be generalized to other big data problems with high volume and velocity.

}, keywords = {Big Data Analysis, Data Stream Processing, network data analysis, System Performance}, author = {Arian B{\"a}r and Alessandro Finamore and Pedro Casas and Lukasz Golab and Marco Mellia} } @inproceedings {Cas2014, title = {Understanding HTTP Traffic and CDN Behavior from the Eyes of a Mobile ISP}, booktitle = {Passive and Active Measurements Conference (PAM)}, year = {2014}, author = {Pedro Casas and Pierdomenico Fiadino and Arian B{\"a}r} } @inproceedings {DR:PAM-14c, title = {Violation of Interdomain Routing Assumptions}, booktitle = {Passive and Active Measurement (PAM)}, year = {2014}, month = {03/2014}, address = {Los Angeles, USA}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi14pam-c.pdf}, author = {R. Mazloum and M.-O. Buob and J. Auge and B. Baynat and T. Friedman and D. Rossi} } @inproceedings {Fiaa, title = {Vivisecting WhatsApp through Large-Scale Measurements in Mobile Networks}, booktitle = {SIGCOMM 2014}, year = {2014}, month = {08/2014}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {Chicago, USA}, abstract = {

WhatsApp, the new giant in instant multimedia messaging in mobile networks is rapidly increasing its popularity, taking over the traditional SMS/MMS messaging. In this paper we present the first large-scale characterization of WhatsApp, useful among others to ISPs willing to understand the impacts of this and similar applications on their networks. Through the combined analysis of passive measurements at the core of a national mobile network, worldwide geo-distributed active measurements, and traffic analysis at end devices, we show that: (i) the WhatsApp hosting architecture is highly centralized and exclusively located in the US; (ii) video sharing covers almost 40\% of the total WhatsApp traffic volume; (iii) flow characteristics depend on the OS of the end device; (iv) despite the big latencies to US servers, download throughputs are as high as 1.5 Mbps; (v) users react immediately and negatively to service outages through social networks feedbacks.

}, keywords = {Large-Scale Measurements, mobile networks, WhatsApp}, author = {Pierdomenico Fiadino and Mirko Schiavone and Pedro Casas} } @article {6975242, title = {When YouTube Does not Work - Analysis of QoE-Relevant Degradation in Google CDN Traffic}, journal = {Network and Service Management, IEEE Transactions on}, volume = {11}, year = {2014}, month = {Dec}, pages = {441-457}, keywords = {CDN distributed services, CDN server selection strategies, client-server systems, content delivery network, Content Delivery Networks, Degradation, dynamic approach, dynamic server selection strategies, end-user QoE, end-user quality of experience, European ISP, Google, Google CDN traffic, Google server selection strategies, IP networks, iterative structured process, load reduction, QoE-relevant anomaly characterization, QoE-relevant anomaly detection, QoE-relevant anomaly diagnosis, QoE-relevant degradation, Quality of Experience, Servers, social networking (online), statistical analysis, statistical analysis methodologies, Statistical Data Analysis, telecommunication traffic, Traffic Monitoring, Videos, watching experience improvement, YouTube, YouTube flow trace collection, YouTube QoE-relevant degradation, YouTube videos}, issn = {1932-4537}, doi = {10.1109/TNSM.2014.2377691}, author = {Casas, Pedro and D{\textquoteright}Alconzo, Alessandro and Fiadino, Pierdomenico and B{\"a}r, Arian and Finamore, Alessandro and Zseby, Tanja} } @inproceedings {A2014, title = {Who to Blame when YouTube is not Working? Detecting Anomalies in CDN Provisioned Services}, booktitle = {TRAC}, year = {2014}, month = {08/2014}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Nicosia, Cyprus}, author = {Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and Pedro Casas and Pierdomenico Fiadino and Arian B{\"a}r and Alessandro Finamore} } @inproceedings {Cas2014b, title = {YouTube All Around: Characterizing YouTube from Mobile and Fixed-line Network Vantage Points}, booktitle = {EuCNC}, year = {2014}, month = {06/2014}, address = {Bologna, IT}, author = {Pedro Casas and Pierdomenico Fiadino and Arian B{\"a}r and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and Alessandro Finamore and Marco Mellia} } @inproceedings {Cas2014c, title = {YouTube in the Move: Understanding the Performance of YouTube in Cellular Networks (BEST PAPER AWARD RUNNER UP)}, booktitle = {Wireless Days 2014}, year = {2014}, month = {11/2014}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Rio de Janeiro, Brazil}, abstract = {

YouTube is the most popular and volume-dominant service in today{\textquoteright}s Internet, and is changing the way ISPs manage their networks. Understanding the performance of YouTube traffic is paramount for ISPs, specially for mobile operators, who must handle the huge surge of traffic with the constraints and challenges of cellular networks. In this paper we present an empirical analysis of the performance of YouTube flows accessed through a national-wide cellular network, considering download throughput as well as end-user Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics. The analysis considers the characteristics and impacts of the Content Delivery Network hosting YouTube, and compares its behavior with other popular HTTP video streaming services accessed through cellular networks. The QoE analysis is performed through end-user device measurements, which directly reflect the experience of the end-users. Our study additionally shows the potentiality of monitoring YouTube performance in cellular networks directly from the smart-phones of the users, bypassing the traffic visibility loss at the core of the network introduced by traffic encryption (e.g., HTTPS).

}, keywords = {Cellular Networks, Content Delivery Networks, End-device Measurements, QoE, Traffic Measurements, YouTube}, author = {Pedro Casas and Pierdomenico Fiadino and Andreas Sackl and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo} } @article {Mic2013, title = {Basic Network Data Analysis}, number = {D3.1}, year = {2013}, month = {05/2013}, institution = {mPlane Consortium}, type = {Public Deliverable}, address = {Torino}, abstract = {

This document describes the requirements, input, output for the algorithms needed to perform analytic tasks on a large amount of data, in the context of WP3. Starting from the use cases defined in WP1, we identify the algorithms needed to address the various scenario requirements. Operating on a large amount of data, these algorithms strive for parallel and scalable approaches; the designing and implementation of the algorithm itself can be a challenging research task since today very little is known concerning how to develop efficient and scalable algorithms that runs on parallel processing frameworks.
The algorithm in the storage layer are characterized by the fact that they operate on a large amount of data, and produce a concise representation of it, extracting features and aggregating it, so that the produced output is easier to handle and understand. Depending on the amount of data produced, on the scenario characteristics and on the time constraints, algorithms can require a real time (or near real time) or a batch processing.
For each algorithm and use case, the input data and the initial state, the computation to run and the output produced are described.

}, keywords = {algorithms, big data, storage}, issn = {D3.1}, author = {Pietro Michiardi and Antonio Barbuzzi and Alessandro Finamore and Stefano Traverso and Daniele Apiletti and Elena Baralis and Tania Cerquitelli and Silvia Chiusano and Luigi Grimaudo and A. Rufini and Francesco Matera and A. Valentii and Maurizio Dusi and Mohamed Ahmed and Tivadar Szemethy and L. N{\'e}meth and R. Szalay and Ilias Leontiadis and Yan Grunenberger and P. Casas and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and A B{\"a}r and D Rossi and YiXi Gong} } @article {Bar2013a, title = {Database Layer Design}, number = {D3.2}, year = {2013}, month = {11/2013}, institution = {mPlane Consortium}, type = {Public Deliverable}, address = {Torino}, keywords = {big data, databases, repositories, storage}, issn = {D3.2}, author = {A B{\"a}r and P. Casas and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and Alessandro Finamore and Antonio Barbuzzi and Maurizio Dusi and Gianni De Rosa and Tivadar Szemethy and Ilias Leontiadis and D Rossi and Jordan Aug{\'e} and Marc-Oliver Buob} } @article {Pap2013, title = {Design of Analysis Modules}, number = {D4.1}, year = {2013}, month = {11/2013}, institution = {mPlane Consortium}, type = {Public Deliverable}, address = {Torino}, keywords = {algorithms, analysis}, isbn = {D4.1}, issn = {D4.1}, author = {Dimitri Papadimitriou and Zied Ben-Houidi and Samir Ghamri-Doudane and D Rossi and M. Milanesio and P. Casas and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and Edion Tego and Francesco Matera and Maurizio Dusi and Tivadar Szemethy and L. M{\'a}th{\'e} and Alessandro Finamore and Stefano Traverso and Ilias Leontiadis and Yan Grunenberger and L. Baltrunas and Benoit Donnet and Guy Leduc and Y. Liao} } @article {Cap2013, title = {First Data Collection Track Record}, number = {D5.1}, year = {2013}, month = {11/2013}, institution = {mPlane Consortium}, type = {Private Deliverable}, address = {Torino}, keywords = {data sets, integration, measurement systems, scenarios, use cases}, author = {Alessandro Capello and Fabrizio Invernizzi and Omar Jabr and Dimitri Papadimitriou and Dario Rossi and YiXi Gong and Brian Trammell and Marco Milanesio and Ernst Biersack and Rolf Winter and Francesco Matera and Arianna Rufini and Edion Tego and Maurizio Dusi and Balazs Szabo and Tivadar Szemethy and Alessandro Finamore and Marco Mellia and Ilias Leontiadis and Benoit Donnet} } @inproceedings {Fia2013, title = {HTTPTag: A Flexible On-line HTTP Classification System for Operational 3G Networks}, booktitle = {INFOCOM{\textquoteright}2013 Demo/Poster Session (INFOCOM{\textquoteright}2013 - Demo/Poster Session)}, year = {2013}, address = {Turin, Italy}, abstract = {

The popularity of web-based services and applications like YouTube and Facebook has taken HTTP back to the pole position on end-user traffic consumption. We present HTTPTag, a flexible on-line HTTP classification system based on pattern matching and tagging. HTTPTag recognizes on the fly and tracks the evolution of more than 280 applications running on top of HTTP in an operational 3G network, representing more than 70\% of the total HTTP traffic volume consumed by its customers. HTTPTag improves the network traffic visibility of an operator, performing tasks such as top-services ranking, long-term monitoring of applications popularity, and trend analysis among others.

}, keywords = {3G Networks, HTTP, Pattern Matching, Traffic Classification}, author = {Pierdomenico Fiadino and A B{\"a}r and P. Casas} } @inproceedings {Ros2013, title = {I tube, YouTube, P2PTube: assessing ISP benefits of peer-assisted caching of YouTube content}, booktitle = {IEEE P2P{\textquoteright}XIII}, year = {2013}, month = {09/2013}, abstract = {

This paper proposes P2PTube, a very simple yet effective set-top-box system to assist diffusion of YouTube videos. We argue that, due to the spatial and temporal nature of video requests, the simplest design already provides non marginal gains. Our trace driven evaluation shows that, with moderate cache size (100MB) and nominal upload rates (500Kbps), about half of the video requests could be served by P2PTube. Interestingly, we also see that non marginal gains are already achievable with tiny caches {\textendash} which is tied to the presence of advertisement prior that the actual video requested by the user.

}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi13p2p-b.pdf}, author = {D Rossi and Y. Nicolas and D. Wolff and Alessandro Finamore} } @inproceedings {Cas2013, title = {IP Mining: Extracting Knowledge from the Dynamics of the Internet Addressing Space (BEST PAPER AWARD)}, booktitle = {25th International Teletraffic Congress, ITC 25}, year = {2013}, abstract = {

Going back to the Internet of one decade ago, HTTP-based content and web services were provided by centralized or barely distributed servers. Single hosts providing exclusive services at fixed IP addresses was the standard approach. Current situation has drastically changed, and the mapping of IPs to different content and services is nowadays extremely dynamic. The adoption of large CDNs by major Internet players, the extended usage of transparent content caching, the explosion of Cloud-based services, and the decoupling between content providers and the hosting infrastructure have created a difficult to manage Internet landscape. Understanding such a complex scenario is paramount for network operators, both to control the traffic on their networks and to improve the quality experienced by their customers, specially when something goes wrong. Using a full week of HTTP traffic traces collected at the mobile broadband network of a major European ISP, this paper studies the associations between web services, the hosting organizations-ASes, and the content servers{\textquoteright} IPs. By mining correlations among these, we extract useful insights about the dynamics of the IP addressing space used by the top web services, and the way content providers and hosting organizations deliver their services to the mobile endusers. The extracted knowledge is applied on two specific use-cases, the former on hosting and service delivery characterization, the latter on automatic IP-based HTTP services classification.

}, keywords = {Content Delivery Networks, HTTP Traffic, IP Addressing Space, Traffic Classification and Analysis}, doi = {10.1109/ITC.2013.6662933}, author = {Pedro Casas and Pierdomenico Fiadino and Arian B{\"a}r} } @inbook {Pap2013b, title = {Measurement-based Experimental Research Methodology}, booktitle = {Measurement Methodology and Tools}, series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series}, volume = {7586}, year = {2013}, pages = {pp 5-22}, publisher = {Springer Berlin Heidelberg}, organization = {Springer Berlin Heidelberg}, issn = {978-3-642-41295-0}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-41296-7_2}, author = {D. Papadimitriou and L. F{\`a}brega and P. Vil{\`a} and D. Careglio and P. Demeester} } @inproceedings {Tra2013c, title = {A Measurement-Centered Approach to Latency Reduction}, booktitle = {ISOC Workshop on Reducing Internet Latency}, year = {2013}, month = {09/2013}, type = {Position Paper}, address = {London, England}, url = {http://www.internetsociety.org/latency2013}, author = {Brian Trammell and Alessandro Finamore and Marco Mellia} } @inproceedings {Cas2013c, title = {Mini-IPC: A Minimalist Approach for HTTP Traffic Classification using IP Addresses}, booktitle = {4th International Workshop on Traffic Analysis and Classification, TRAC 2013}, year = {2013}, abstract = {

The popularity of web-based services and multimedia applications like YouTube, Google Web Search, Facebook, and a bewildering range of Internet applications has taken HTTP back to the pole position on end-user traffic consumption. Today{\textquoteright}s Internet users exchange most of their content via HTTP. In this paper we address the problem of on-line HTTP traffic classification from network measurements. Building on the results provided by HTTPTag, a flexible system for on-line HTTP classification, we present and explore Mini-IPC. Mini-IPC is a minimalist approach for classifying HTTP flows using only the IP addresses of the servers hosting the corresponding content. Using one full week of HTTP traffic traces collected at the mobile broadband network of a major European ISP, we investigate to which extent the most popular HTTP-based services are hosted by well-defined sets of IP addresses, and evaluate the performance of Mini-IPC to classify these services using IPs only.

}, keywords = {CDNs, HTTP Traffic, IP Addressing Space, Mobile Networks{\textquoteright} Traffic, Traffic Classification and Analysis}, doi = {10.1109/IWCMC.2013.6583537}, author = {P. Casas and Pierdomenico Fiadino} } @article {Tra2013d, title = {mPlane Architecture Specification}, number = {D1.3}, year = {2013}, month = {11/2013}, institution = {mPlane Consortium}, type = {Public Deliverable}, address = {Torino}, keywords = {architecture, measurement, platform, scenario, use case}, author = {Brian Trammell and Marco Mellia and Alessandro Finamore and Stefano Traverso and Tivadar Szemethy and Balazs Szabo and D Rossi and Benoit Donnet and Fabrizio Invernizzi and Dimitri Papadimitriou} } @inproceedings {Chi2013, title = {Passive bufferbloat measurement exploiting transport layer information}, booktitle = {IEEE GLOBECOM}, year = {2013}, month = {12/2013}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi13globecom.pdf}, author = {C. Chirichella and D Rossi and C. Testa and T. Friedman and A. Pescape} } @article {Dus2013, title = {Plans for Using and Disseminating mPlane Knowledge}, number = {D7.2}, year = {2013}, month = {11/2013}, institution = {mPlane Consortium}, type = {Public Deliverable}, address = {Torino}, keywords = {dissemination, exploitation, open-source software, publications, standardization}, issn = {D7.2}, author = {Maurizio Dusi and Saverio Niccolini and Antonio Barbuzzi and M. Milanesio and Alessandro Finamore and Brian Trammell and Edion Tego and Francesco Matera and Tivadar Szemethy and Rolf Winter and Zied Ben-Houidi and Andrea Fregosi and Benoit Donnet and Fabrizio Invernizzi and Dimitri Papadimitriou and Ilias Leontiadis and Yan Grunenberger and P. Casas} } @inproceedings {Chi2013c, title = {Remotely Gauging Upstream Bufferbloat Delays}, booktitle = {Passive and Active Measurement (PAM)}, year = {2013}, abstract = { {\textquoteleft}{\textquoteleft}Bufferbloat{\textquoteright}{\textquoteright} is the growth in buffer size that has led Internet delays to occasionally exceed the light propagation delay from the Earth to the Moon. Manufacturers have built in large buffers to prevent losses on Wi-Fi, cable and ADSL links. But the combination of some links{\textquoteright} limited bandwidth with TCP{\textquoteright}s tendency to saturate that bandwidth results in excessive queuing delays. In response, new congestion control protocols such as BitTorrent{\textquoteright}s uTP/LEDBAT aim at explicitly limiting the delay that they add over the bottleneck link. This work proposes and validate a methodology to monitor the upstream queuing delay experienced by remote hosts, both those using LEDBAT, through LEDBAT{\textquoteright}s native one-way delay measurements, and those using TCP (via the Time-stamp Option). }, doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-36516-4_25}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi13pam.pdf}, author = {C. Chirichella and D Rossi and C. Testa and T. Friedman and A. Pescape} } @article {Pap2013c, title = {Selection of Existing Probes and Datasets}, number = {D2.1}, year = {2013}, month = {08/2013}, institution = {mPlane Consortium}, type = {Public Deliverable}, address = {Torino}, abstract = {The mPlane architecture has been designed to include the possibility to interface with existing systems and platforms. While most measurement platforms in existence target a very specific measurement use case (e.g., the discovery of the Internet{\textquoteright}s router-level topology, the continuous measurement of the RTT among host pairs, the exporting via SNMP of network state, etc.), there are platforms that have a large deployed base, with lot of data being at disposal, and/or continuously collecting data. It would be a waste of resources to merely reproduce this effort within mPlane. Instead, mPlane aims at directly interfacing with existing systems and re-using their capabilities and data to feed measurement results to the mPlane intelligence. This document lists selected existing systems that are important for mPlane either for theoretical, conceptual or practical reasons, and that are part of the background of mPlane partners. A sub-set of these systems will be eventually incorporated into mPlane by developing the necessary interfaces. Others could be integrated by the means of proxy probes, i.e., the conceptual component responsible for such interfacing. The main focus of this document is to elaborate the concept of proxy probes, enumerate the systems that will be possibly considered for interface (proxy probe) development, and to give high level descriptions of the proxy probe design for these systems. The following list enumerates the systems that the consortium has chosen to include: - QoF - a TCP-aware IPFIX flow meter  Cisco Ping and SLA Agents - commercial availability and basic network parameter agents  - Tracebox - a tool for middlebox detection and identification - Scamper - a sophisticated active probing tool - MERLIN - a router-level topology discovery tool - TopHat - a configurable measurement system on top of PlanetLab - Tstat - a passive network monitoring tool - BlockMon - a flexible network monitoring and analysis tool - MisuraInternet - a QoS measurement system - Firelog - a Firefox plugin to measure HTTP QoE - Pytomo - an end-host-based video OoE measurement tool - DATI - a high performance deep packet inspector - MobiPerf - a tool for monitoring smartphone performance}, keywords = {active probes, existing probes, passive probes, probes, proxy probes}, author = {Dimitri Papadimitriou and Dario Rossi and YiXi Gong and Brian Trammell and Marco Milanesio and Ernst Biersack and Rolf Winter and Francesco Matera and Maurizio Dusi and Balazs Szabo and Tivadar Szemethy and Alessandro Finamore and Marco Mellia and Alessandro Capello and Fabio Invernizzi and Omar Jabr and Ilias Leontiadis and Benoit Donnet} } @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} } @inproceedings {Val2012, title = {Breaking for commercials: characterizing mobile advertising}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Internet measurement conference}, year = {2012}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {Boston, MA}, abstract = {

Mobile phones and tablets can be considered as the first incarnation of the post-PC era. Their explosive adoption rate has been driven by a number of factors, with the most signifcant influence being applications (apps) and app markets. Individuals and organizations are able to develop and publish apps, and the most popular form of monetization is mobile advertising.

The mobile advertisement (ad) ecosystem has been the target of prior research, but these works typically focused on a small set of apps or are from a user privacy perspective. In this work we make use of a unique, anonymized data set corresponding to one day of traffic for a major European mobile carrier with more than 3 million subscribers. We further take a principled approach to characterize mobile ad traffic along a number of dimensions, such as overall traffic, frequency, as well as possible implications in terms of en- ergy on a mobile device.

Our analysis demonstrates a number of inefficiencies in today{\textquoteright}s ad delivery. We discuss the benefits of well-known techniques, such as pre-fetching and caching, to limit the energy and network signalling overhead caused by current systems. A prototype im- plementation on Android devices demonstrates an improvement of 50\% in terms of energy consumption for offline ad-sponsored apps while limiting the amount of ad related traffic.\ 

}, keywords = {advertisement, caching, cellular, energy, smartphones, traffic}, isbn = {978-1-4503-1705-4}, doi = {10.1145/2398776.2398812}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2398776.2398812}, author = {Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez and Jay Shah and Alessandro Finamore and Yan Grunenberger and Konstantina Papagiannaki and Hamed Haddadi and Jon Crowcroft} } @inproceedings {Fin2012, title = {The need for an intelligent measurement plane: The example of time-variant CDN policies}, booktitle = {Telecommunications Network Strategy and Planning Symposium (NETWORKS), 2012 XVth International }, year = {2012}, month = {10/2012}, pages = {1 - 6 }, abstract = {In this paper we characterize how web-based services are delivered by large organizations in today{\textquoteright}s Internet. Taking advantage oftwo week-long data sets separated in time by 10 months and reporting the web activity of more than 10,000 ADSL residential customers, we identify the services offered by large organizations like Google, Akamai and Amazon. We then compare theevolution of both policies used to serve requests, and the infrastructure they use to match the users{\textquoteright} demand. Results depict anovercrowded scenario in constant evolution. Big-players are more and more responsible for the majority of the volume and a plethora of other organizations offering similar or more specific services through different CDNs and traffic policies. Unfortunately, no standard tools and methodologies are available to capture and expose the hidden properties of this in constant evolution picture. A deeper understanding of such dynamics is however fundamental to improve the performance of current and future Internet. To this extend, we claim the need for a Internet-wide, standard, flexible and intelligent measurement plane to be added tothe current Internet infrastructure.}, keywords = {Facebook, Google, Monitoring, Organizations, Servers, Streaming media, Throughput}, issn = {978-1-4673-1390-2}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/NETWKS.2012.6381662}, author = {Alessandro Finamore and Vinicius Gehlen and Marco Mellia and Maurizio M Munafo{\textquoteright}} }