@inproceedings {Van2016, title = {A Brief History of MPLS Usage in IPv6}, booktitle = {Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM)}, year = {2016}, month = {03/2016}, abstract = {

Recent researches have stated the fast deployment of IPv6. It\ has been demonstrated that IPv6 grows much faster, being so more and more\ adopted by both Internet service providers but also by servers and end-hosts.\ In parallel, researches have been conducted to discover and assess the usage of\ MPLS tunnels. Indeed, recent developments in the ICMP protocol make certain
categories of MPLS tunnels transparent to traceroute probing. However, these\ studies focus only on IPv4, where MPLS is strongly deployed.

In this paper, we provide a first look at how MPLS is used under IPv6\ networks using traceroute data collected by CAIDA.\ We have observed, at the first glance, that the MPLS deployment and usage seem to greatly differ between IPv4 and IPv6,\ in particular in the way MPLS label stacks are used. While label stacks are not that frequent\ in IPv4 (and mostly correspond to a VPN usage), they are prevalent in IPv6. \ However, after a deeper look at the label stack typical content in IPv6, we understand that 2-label stack tunnels are mainly used for dual stack 6PE tunnels and ECMP load sharing purpose. \ The technical deployment of such tunnels is really similar to VPN in practice but the objective is not the same (they are standard tunnels made with the IPv4 LDP for carrying IPv6 traffic).

}, keywords = {6PE tunnels, IPv6, LSE Stack, MPLS}, author = {Yves Vanaubel and Pascal M{\'e}rindol and Jean-Jacques Pansiot and Benoit Donnet} } @article {Teg2016, title = {Experimental investigation on TCP throughput behavior in Optical Fiber Access Networks}, journal = {Fiber and Integrated Optics}, year = {2016}, type = {Journal article.}, author = {Edion Tego and Francesco Matera and Donato Del Buono} } @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} } @article {Teg2015, title = {Comparison of TCP congestion control algorithms in data transfers on high RTT }, year = {2015}, type = {Poster}, author = {Edion Tego and Francesco Matera} } @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} } @article {2016, title = {HFSP: Bringing size-based scheduling to Hadoop}, journal = {IEEE Transaction on Cloud Computing}, year = {2015}, author = {Mario Pastorelli and Damiano Carra and Matteo Dell{\textquoteright}Amico and Pietro Michiardi} } @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 {Van2015, title = {MPLS Under the Microscope: Revealing Actual Transit Path Diversity}, booktitle = {Internet Measurement Conference (IMC)}, year = {2015}, month = {10/2015}, abstract = {

Traffic Engineering (TE) is one of the keys for improving packet forwarding in\ the Internet. It allows IP network operators to finely tune their forwarding\ paths according to various customer needs. One of the most popular tool\ available today for optimizing the use of networking resources is MPLS. On the\ one hand, operators may use MPLS and label distribution mechanisms such as RSVP-TE\ in conjunction with BGP to define multiple transit paths (for a given edge pair)
verifying different constraints on their network. On the other hand, when\ operators simply enable LDP for distributing MPLS labels in order to improve the\ scalability of their network, another kind of path diversity may appear thanks\ to the ECMP feature of IGP routing.

In this paper, using an MPLS labels analysis, we demonstrate that it is possible\ to better understand the transit path diversity deployed within a given ISP.\ More specifically, we introduce the Label Pattern Recognition (LPR) algorithm, a\ method for analyzing traceroute data including MPLS information. LPR reveals\ the actual usage of MPLS according to the inferred label distribution protocol and\ is able to make the distinction between ECMP and TE multi-path forwarding.\ Based on an extensive and longitudinal traceroute dataset obtained from CAIDA,
we apply LPR and find that each ISP behavior is really specific in regard to its\ MPLS usage. In particular, we are able to observe independently for each ISP\ the MPLS path diversity and usage, and its evolution over time.\ Globally speaking, the main outcomes of our study are that (i) the usage of\ MPLS has been increasing over the the last five years with basic encapsulation\ being predominant, (ii) path diversity is mainly provided thanks to ECMP and\ LDP, and, (iii), TE using MPLS is as common as MPLS without path diversity.

}, keywords = {ECMP, LDP, MPLS, multipath, network discovery, RSVP-TE, traceroute, traffic engineering}, author = {Yves Vanaubel and Pascal M{\'e}rindol and Jean-Jacques Pansiot and Benoit Donnet} } @article {7096995, title = {Personal Cloud Storage Benchmarks and Comparison}, journal = {Cloud Computing, IEEE Transactions on}, volume = {PP}, year = {2015}, pages = {1-1}, abstract = {The large amount of space offered by personal cloud storage services (e.g., Dropbox and OneDrive), together with the possibility of synchronizing devices seamlessly, keep attracting customers to the cloud. Despite the high public interest, little information about system design and actual implications on performance is available when selecting a cloud storage service. Systematic benchmarks to assist in comparing services and understanding the effects of design choices are still lacking. This paper proposes a methodology to understand and benchmark personal cloud storage services. Our methodology unveils their architecture and capabilities. Moreover, by means of repeatable and customizable tests, it allows the measurement of performance metrics under different workloads. The effectiveness of the methodology is shown in a case study in which 11 services are compared under the same conditions. Our case study reveals interesting differences in design choices. Their implications are assessed in a series of benchmarks. Results show no clear winner, with all services having potential for improving performance. In some scenarios, the synchronization of the same files can take 20 times longer. In other cases, we observe a wastage of twice as much network capacity, questioning the design of some services. Our methodology and results are thus useful both as benchmarks and as guidelines for system design.}, keywords = {Benchmark testing, Cloud computing, Cloud storage, Computers, Google, Measurements, Performance, Servers, Synchronization}, issn = {2168-7161}, doi = {10.1109/TCC.2015.2427191}, author = {Enrico Bocchi and Idilio Drago and Marco Mellia} } @inproceedings {Boc2015, title = {Personal Cloud Storage: Usage, Performance and Impact of Terminals }, booktitle = {4th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Networking (IEEE CloudNet 2015)}, year = {2015}, month = {10/2015}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Niagara Falls, Canada}, abstract = {

Personal cloud storage services such as Dropbox and OneDrive are popular among Internet users. They help in sharing content and backing up data by relying on the cloud to store files. The rise of mobile terminals and the presence of new providers question whether the usage of cloud storage is evolving. This knowledge is essential to understand the workload these services need to handle, their performance, and implications. In this paper we present a comprehensive characterization of personal cloud storage services. Relying on traces collected for one month in an operational network, we show that users of each service present distinct behaviors. Dropbox is now threatened by competitors, with OneDrive and Google Drive reaching large market shares. However, the popularity of the latter services seems to be driven by their integration into Windows and Android. Indeed, around 50\% of their users do not produce any workload. Considering performance, providers show distinct trade-offs, with bottlenecks that hardly allow users to fully exploit their access line bandwidth. Finally, usage of cloud services is now ordinary among mobile users, thanks to the automatic backup of pictures and media files.

}, keywords = {Cloud storage, Monitoring}, url = {http://www.ieee-cloudnet.org/program.html}, author = {Enrico Bocchi and Idilio Drago and Marco Mellia} } @article {Teg2015a, title = {SLA verification and certification, Traffic Monitoring and Analysis}, year = {2015}, type = {Poster}, author = {Edion Tego and Elena Mammi and Ariana Rufini and Francesco Matera} } @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} } @inbook {Sil2014, title = {Aggregation of Statistical Data from Passive Probes: Techniques and Best Practices}, booktitle = {Traffic Monitoring and Analysis}, series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science}, volume = {8406}, year = {2014}, pages = {38-50}, publisher = {Springer Berlin Heidelberg}, organization = {Springer Berlin Heidelberg}, abstract = {

Passive probes continuously generate statistics on large number of metrics, that are possibly represented as probability mass functions (pmf). The need for consolidation of several pmfs arises in two contexts, namely: (i) whenever a central point collects and aggregates measurement of multiple disjoint vantage points, and (ii) whenever a local measurement processed at a single vantage point needs to be distributed over multiple cores of the same physical probe, in order to cope with growing link capacity. In this work, we take an experimental approach and study both cases using, whenever possible, open source software and datasets. Considering different consolidation strategies, we assess their accuracy in estimating pmf deciles (from the 10th to the 90th) of diverse metrics, obtaining general design and tuning guidelines. In our dataset, we find that Monotonic Spline Interpolation over a larger set of percentiles (e.g., adding 5th, 10th, 15th, and so on) allow fairly accurate pmf consolidation in both the multiple vantage points (median error is about 1\%, maximum 30\%) and local processes (median 0.1\%, maximum 1\%) cases.

}, keywords = {Data aggregation, data reduction, scalability problem}, isbn = {978-3-642-54998-4}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-54999-1_4}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54999-1_4}, author = {Colabrese, Silvia and Rossi, Dario and Mellia, Marco} } @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 {DR:ICN-14c, title = {Analyzing Cacheable Traffic in ISP Access Networks for Micro CDN applications via Content-Centric Networking}, booktitle = {ACM SIGCOMM Information Centric Networks (ICN)}, year = {2014}, month = {09/2014}, address = {Paris, FR}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi14icn-c.pdf}, author = {Imbrenda, Claudio and Muscariello, Luca and Rossi, Dario} } @inproceedings {Ruf2014b, title = {Bandwidth Measurements and Capacity Exploitation in Gigabit Passive Optical Networks}, booktitle = {Fotonica 2014}, year = {2014}, month = {05/2014}, abstract = {

We report an experimental investigation on the
measurement of the available bandwidth for users in Gigabit
Passive Optical Networks (GPON) and the limitations caused by
the Internet protocols. We point out that the huge capacity
offered by the GPON highlights the enormous differences that
can be showed among the available and actually exploitable
bandwidth in the case of TCP. In this ultrabroadband
environment we also investigated on use of the UDP and of the
multisession TCP. A correlation in terms of QoE is also reported.

}, keywords = {access capacity, GPON, QoE, QoS, Throughput}, author = {Arianna Rufini and Edion Tego and Francesco Matera and Marco Mellia} } @inproceedings {Boc2014, title = {Cloud Storage Service Benchmarking: Methodologies and Experimentations}, booktitle = {3rd IEEE International Conference on Cloud Networking (IEEE CloudNet 2014)}, year = {2014}, month = {10/2014}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Luxembourg}, abstract = {

Data storage is one of today{\textquoteright}s fundamental services with companies, universities and research centers having the need of storing large amounts of data every day. Cloud storage services are emerging as strong alternative to local storage, allowing customers to save costs of buying and maintaining expensive hardware. Several solutions are available on the market, the most famous being Amazon S3. However it is rather difficult to access information about each service architecture, performance, and pricing. To shed light on storage services from the customer perspective, we propose a benchmarking methodology, apply it to four popular offers (Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Windows Azure Blob and Rackspace Cloud Files), and compare their performance. Each service is analysed as a black box and benchmarked through crafted workloads. We take the perspective of a customer located in Europe, looking for possible service providers and the optimal data center where to deploy its applications. At last, we complement the analysis by comparing the actual and forecast costs faced when using each service.

According to collected results, all services show eventual weaknesses related to some workload, with no all-round eligible winner, e.g., some offers providing excellent or poor performance when exchanging large or small files. For all services, it is of paramount importance to accurately select the data center to where deploy the applications, with throughput that varies by factors from 2x to 10x. The methodology (and tools implementing it) here presented is instrumental for potential customers to identify the most suitable offer for their needs.\ 

}, keywords = {Amazon S3, Benchmarking, Cloud storage, Performance measurement, Web services, Windows Azure}, author = {Enrico Bocchi and Marco Mellia and Sofiane Sarni} } @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} } @article {D43, title = { Cross-check of Analysis Modules and Reasoner Interactions}, number = {D4.3}, year = {2014}, month = {10/2014}, type = {Deliverable}, keywords = {reasoner, WP4}, author = {Umberto Manferdini and Stefano Traverso and Marco Mellia and Edion Tego and Francesco Matera and Zied Ben Houidi and Marco Milanesio and Pietro Michiardi and Dario Rossi and D. Cicalese and D. Joumblatt and Jordan Aug{\'e} and Maurizio Dusi and Sofia Nikitaki and Mohamed Ahmed and Ilias Leontiadis and L. Baltrunas and M. Varvello and Pedro Casas and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and Benoit Donnet and W. Du and Guy Leduc and Y. Liao and Alessandro Capello and Fabrizio Invernizzi} } @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} } @article {Ber2014, title = {A Distributed Architecture for the Monitoring of Clouds and CDNs: Applications to Amazon AWS}, journal = {IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management}, volume = {In press}, year = {2014}, abstract = {

Clouds and CDNs are systems that tend to separate the content being requested by users from the physical servers capable of serving it. From the network point of view, monitoring and optimizing performance for the traffic they generate is a challenging task, given the same resource can be located in multiple places, which can in turn change at any time. The first step in understanding Cloud and CDN systems is thus the engineering of a monitoring platform. In this paper, we propose a novel solution which combines passive and active measurements, and whose workflow has been tailored to specifically characterize the traffic generated by Cloud and CDN infrastructures. We validate our platform by performing a longitudinal characterization of the very well known Cloud and CDN infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services (AWS). By observing the traffic generated by more than 50,000 Internet users of an Italian ISP, we explore the EC2, S3 and CloudFront AWS services, unveiling their infrastructure, the pervasiveness of web-services they host, and their traffic allocation policies as seen from our vantage points. Most importantly, we observe their evolution over a two- year long period. The solution provided in this paper can be of interest for i) developers aiming at building measurement tools for Cloud Infrastructure Providers, ii) developers interested in failure and anomaly detection systems, and iii) third-party SLA certificators who can design systems to independently monitor performance. At last, we believe the results about AWS presented in this paper are interesting as they are among the first to unveil properties of AWS as seen from the operator point of view.

}, keywords = {Amazon, AWS, CDNs, Clouds}, author = {Ignacio Bermudez and Stefano Traverso and Marco Mellia and Maurizio Munafo{\textquoteright}} } @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} } @article {Tra, title = {mPlane: an Intelligent Measurement Plane for the Internet}, journal = {IEEE Communications Magazine, Special Issue on Monitoring and Troubleshooting Multi-domain Networks using Measurement Federations}, volume = {42}, year = {2014}, month = {05/2014}, author = {Brian Trammell and Pedro Casas and Dario Rossi and Arian B{\"a}r and Zied Ben-Houidi and Ilias Leontiadis and Tivadar Szemethy and Marco Mellia} } @article {Ruf2014, title = {Multilevel Bandwidth Measurements and Capacity Exploitation in Gigabit Passive Optical Networks}, journal = {IET Communications}, volume = {8}, year = {2014}, month = {11/2014}, pages = {8}, chapter = {3357}, abstract = {

We report an experimental investigation on the measurement of the available bandwidth for the users in Gigabit Passive Optical Networks (GPON) and the limitations caused by the Internet protocols, and TCP in particular. We point out that the huge capacity offered by the GPON highlights the enormous differences that can be showed among the available and actually exploitable bandwidth. In fact, while the physical layer capacity can reach value of 100 Mb/s and more, the bandwidth at disposal of the user (i.e. either throughput at transport layer or goodput at application layer) can be much lower when applications and services based on TCP protocol are considered. In the context of Service Level Agreements (SLA) verification, we show how to simultaneously measure throughput and line capacity by offering a method to verify multilayer SLA. We also show how it is possible to better to exploit the physical layer capacity by adopting multiple TCP connections to avoid the bottleneck of a single connection.

}, keywords = {Fiber Networks, GPON, Quality of Service, TCP}, issn = {1751-8628}, doi = {10.1049/iet-com.2014.0165}, url = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6980492}, author = {Arianna Rufini and Marco Mellia and Edion Tego and Francesco Matera} } @inproceedings {Ruf2014a, title = {Multilevel QoS vs QoE measurements and Verification of Service Level Agreements}, booktitle = {European Conference on Networks and Communications, EUCNC 2014}, year = {2014}, month = {06/2014}, abstract = {

Experimental investigation on QoS measurements in terms of throughput versus access capacity, including a correlation in terms of QoE evaluated for some web TV\ 

}, author = {Arianna Rufini and Edion Tego and Francesco Matera} } @inproceedings {DR:TMA-14c, title = {Peeking Through the BitTorrent Seedbox Hosting Ecosystem}, booktitle = {Traffic Monitoring and Analysis (TMA)}, year = {2014}, abstract = {

In this paper, we propose a lightweight method for detecting and classifying BitTorrent content providers with a minimal amount of resources. While
heavy methodologies are typically used (which require long term observation
and data exchange with peers of the swarm and/or a semantic analysis of torrent
websites), we instead argue that such complexity can be avoided by analyzing
the correlations between peers and torrents. We apply our methodology to study
over 50K torrents injected in ThePirateBay during one month, collecting more
than 400K IPs addresses. Shortly, we find that exploiting the correlations not
only enhances the classification accuracy keeping the technique lightweight (our
methodology reliably identifies about 150 seedboxes), but also uncovers seeding behaviors that were not previously noticed (e.g., as multi-port and multi-host
seeding). Finally, we correlate the popularity of seedbox hosting in our dataset
to criteria (e.g., cost, storage space, Web popularity) that can bias the selection
process of BitTorrent content providers.

}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi14tma-c.pdf}, author = {Dario Rossi and Guilhem Pujol and Xiao Wang and Fabien Mathieu} } @inproceedings {Teg2014, title = {Quality of Service Management based on Software Defined Networking Approach in wide GbE Networks}, booktitle = {Euromed}, year = {2014}, month = {11/2014}, abstract = {

This work experimentally demonstrates how to control and manage user Quality of Service (QoS) by acting on the switching on-off of the optical Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) interfaces in a wide area network test bed including routers and GPON accesses. The QoS is monitored at the user location by means of active probes developed in the framework of the FP7 MPLANE project. The network topology is managed according to some current Software Defined Network issues and in particular an Orchestrator checks the user quality, the traffic load in the GbE links and manages the network interface reconfiguration when congestion occurs in some network segments.

}, keywords = {GbE, PON, QoS, SDN}, author = {Edion Tego and Francesco Matera and Vincenzo Attanasio and Donato Del Buono} } @inproceedings {EURECOM+4268, title = {Revisiting size-based scheduling with estimated job sizes}, booktitle = {{MASCOTS} 2014, {IEEE} 22nd {I}nternational {S}ymposium on {M}odeling analysis and simulation of computer and telecommunication systems, {S}eptember 9-11, 2014, {P}aris, {F}rance / {A}lso published on {A}r{X}iv}, year = {2014}, month = {03}, address = {{P}aris, {FRANCE}}, url = {http://www.eurecom.fr/publication/4268}, author = {Dell{\textquoteright}Amico, Matteo and Carra, Damiano and Pastorelli, Mario and Michiardi, Pietro} } @inproceedings {Col2014, title = {Scalable accurate consolidation of passively measured statistical data}, booktitle = {Passive and Active Measurement (PAM), Extended Abstract}, year = {2014}, month = {March}, address = {Los Angeles, USA}, abstract = {

Passive probes continuously collect a significant amount of traffic vol- ume, and autonomously generate statistics on a large number of metrics. A common statistical output of passive probe is represented by probability mass functions (pmf). The need for consolidation of several pmfs arises in two contexts, namely: (i) whenever a central point collects and aggregates measurement of multiple disjoint vantage points, and (ii) whenever a local measurement processed at a single vantage point needs to be distributed over multiple cores of the same physical probe, in order to cope with growing link capacity. Taking an experimental approach, we study both cases assessing the impact of different consolidation strategies, obtaining general design and tuning guidelines.

}, url = {http://perso.telecom-paristech.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi14pam-a.pdf}, author = {S. Colabrese and D Rossi and Marco Mellia} } @article {grimaudoTNSM2014, title = {SeLeCT: Self-Learning Classifier for Internet Traffic}, journal = {IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management}, volume = {11}, year = {2014}, month = {06/2014}, chapter = {144}, abstract = {

Network visibility is a critical part of traffic engineering, network management, and security. The most popular\ current solutions - Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and statistical\ classification, deeply rely on the availability of a training set.\ Besides the cumbersome need to regularly update the signatures,\ their visibility is limited to classes the classifier has been trained\ for. Unsupervised algorithms have been envisioned as a viable\ alternative to automatically identify classes of traffic. However,\ the accuracy achieved so far does not allow to use them for traffic\ classification in practical scenario.

To address the above issues, we propose SeLeCT, a Self-Learning Classifier for Internet Traffic. It uses unsupervised algorithms along with an adaptive seeding approach to automatically\ let classes of traffic emerge, being identified and labeled. Unlike\ traditional classifiers, it requires neither a-priori knowledge of\ signatures nor a training set to extract the signatures. Instead,\ SeLeCT automatically groups flows into pure (or homogeneous)\ clusters using simple statistical features. SeLeCT simplifies label\ assignment (which is still based on some manual intervention) so\ that proper class labels can be easily discovered. Furthermore,\ SeLeCT uses an iterative seeding approach to boost its ability to\ cope with new protocols and applications.

We evaluate the performance of SeLeCT using traffic traces\ collected in different years from various ISPs located in 3\ different continents. Our experiments show that SeLeCT achieves\ excellent precision and recall, with overall accuracy close to 98\%.\ Unlike state-of-art classifiers, the biggest advantage of SeLeCT\ is its ability to discover new protocols and applications in an\ almost automated fashion.

}, keywords = {clustering, self-seeding, Traffic Classification, unsupervised machine learning}, author = {Luigi Grimaudo and Marco Mellia and Elena Baralis and Ram Keralapura} } @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 {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} } @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} } @inproceedings {Dra2013, title = {Benchmarking Personal Cloud Storage}, booktitle = {Internet Measurement Conference - IMC}, year = {2013}, month = {10/2013}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {Barcelona (ES)}, abstract = {

Personal cloud storage services are data-intensive applica- tions already producing a significant share of Internet traffic. Several solutions offered by different companies attract more and more people. However, little is known about each service capabilities, architecture and {\textendash} most of all {\textendash} performance implications of design choices. This paper presents a methodology to study cloud storage services. We apply our methodology to compare 5 popular offers, revealing different system architectures and capabilities. The implications on performance of different designs are assessed executing a series of benchmarks. Our results show no clear winner, with all services suffering from some limitations or having potential for improvement. In some scenarios, the upload of the same file set can take seven times more, wasting twice as much capacity. Our methodology and results are useful thus as both benchmark and guideline for system design.

}, keywords = {Active Measurements, Personal Cloud Storage}, doi = {10.1145/2504730.2504762}, url = {http://www.simpleweb.org/wiki/Cloud_benchmarks}, author = {Idilio Drago and Enrico Bocchi and Marco Mellia and Herman Slatman and Aiko Pras} } @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} } @inproceedings {Ber2013, title = {Exploring the Cloud from Passive Measurements: the Amazon AWS case}, booktitle = {The 32nd Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM{\textquoteright}2013)}, year = {2013}, address = {Turin, Italy}, abstract = {

Cloud Providers are nowadays the most popular way to quickly deploy new services on the Internet. Understanding mechanisms currently adopted in cloud design is fundamental to identify possible bottlenecks, to optimize performance, and to design more efficient platforms. This paper presents a characterization of Amazon{\textquoteright}s Web Services (AWS), the most prominent cloud provider that offers computing, storage, and content delivery platforms. Leveraging passive measurements collected from several vantage points in Italy for several months, we explore the EC2, S3 and CloudFront AWS services to unveil their infrastructure, the pervasiveness of content they host, and their traffic allocation policies. Measurements reveal that most of the content residing on EC2 and S3 is served by one single Amazon datacenter located in Virginia despite it appears to be the worst performing one for Italian users. This causes traffic to take long and expensive paths in the network. Since no automatic migration and load-balancing policies are offered by AWS among different locations, content is exposed to outages, as we were able to observe in our data. The CloudFront CDN, on the contrary, shows much better performance thanks to the effective cache selection policy that serves 98\% of the traffic from the nearest available cache. CloudFront exhibits also dynamic load-balancing policies, in contrast to the static allocation of instances on EC2 and S3. Information presented in this paper will be useful for developers aiming at entrusting AWS to deploy their contents, and for researchers willing to improve cloud design.

}, doi = {10.1109/INFCOM.2013.6566769}, author = {Ignacio Nicolas Bermudez and Stefano Traverso and Marco Mellia and Maurizio M Munafo{\textquoteright}} } @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 {Mar2013, title = {HFSP: Size-based Scheduling for Hadoop}, booktitle = {BIGDATA 2013, IEEE International Conference on BigData, October 6-9, 2013, Santa-Clara, CA, USA}, year = {2013}, month = {10}, url = {http://www.eurecom.fr/publication/4106}, author = {Pastorelli Mario and Barbuzzi Antonio and Carra Damiano and Dell{\textquoteright}Amico Matteo and Michiardi Pietro} } @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} } @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 {Van2013, title = {Network Fingerprinting: TTL-Based Router Signature}, booktitle = {ACM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference (IMC)}, year = {2013}, month = {10/2013}, address = {Barcelona, Spain}, abstract = {

Fingerprinting networking equipment has many potential applications and benefits\ in network management and security. More generally, it is useful for the\ understanding of network structures and their behaviors. In this paper, we\ describe a simple fingerprinting mechanism based on the initial TTL values used\ by routers to reply to various probing messages. We show that main classes
obtained using this simple mechanism are meaningful to distinguish routers\ platforms. Besides, it comes at a very low additional cost compared to standard\ active topology discovery measurements. As a proof of concept, we apply our\ method to gain more insight on the behavior of MPLS routers and to, thus, more\ accurately quantify their visible/invisible deployment.

}, keywords = {fingerprinting, initial TTL, MPLS router signature, network discovery}, doi = {10.1145/2504730.2504761}, author = {Yves Vanaubel and Jean-Jacques Pansiot and Pascal M{\'e}rindol and Benoit Donnet} } @inproceedings {Van2013a, title = {Network Fingerprinting: TTL-Based Router Signatures}, booktitle = {ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC)}, year = {2013}, month = {10/2013}, address = {Barcelona, Spain}, abstract = {

Fingerprinting networking equipment has many potential applications and benefits\ in network management and security. More generally, it is useful for the\ understanding of network structures and their behaviors. In this paper, we\ describe a simple fingerprinting mechanism based on the initial TTL values used\ by routers to reply to various probing messages. We show that main classes\ obtained using this simple mechanism are meaningful to distinguish routers
platforms. Besides, it comes at a very low additional cost compared to standard\ active topology discovery measurements. As a proof of concept, we apply our\ method to gain more insight on the behavior of MPLS routers and to, thus, more\ accurately quantify their visible/invisible deployment.

}, keywords = {fingerprinting, initial TTL, MPLS, network discovery, router signatures}, author = {Yves Vanaubel and Jean-Jacques Pansiot and Pascal M{\'e}rindol and Benoit Donnet} } @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 {Aru2013, title = {Quality-of-Experience driven Acceleration of Thin Client Connections}, booktitle = {IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications}, year = {2013}, month = {08/2013}, edition = {12}, doi = {10.1109/NCA.2013.26}, author = {Mayutan Arumaithurai and Jan Seedorf and Maurizio Dusi and Edo Monticelli and Renato Lo Cigno} } @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 {Gri2013, title = {Self-Learning Classifier for Internet Traffic}, booktitle = {The 5th IEEE International Traffic Monitoring and Analysis Workshop (TMA 2013)}, year = {2013}, abstract = {

Network visibility is a critical part of traffic engineering, network management, and security. Recently, unsupervised algorithms have been envisioned as a viable alternative\ to automatically identify classes of traffic. However, the accuracy\ achieved so far does not allow to use them for traffic classification\ in practical scenario.
In this paper, we propose SeLeCT, a Self-Learning Classifier\ for Internet traffic. It uses unsupervised algorithms along with\ an adaptive learning approach to automatically let classes of\ traffic emerge, being identified and (easily) labeled. SeLeCT\ automatically groups flows into pure (or homogeneous) clusters\ using alternating simple clustering and filtering phases to remove\ outliers. SeLeCT uses an adaptive learning approach to boost its\ ability to spot new protocols and applications. Finally, SeLeCT\ also simplifies label assignment (which is still based on some\ manual intervention) so that proper class labels can be easily\ discovered.
We evaluate the performance of SeLeCT using traffic traces\ collected in different years from various ISPs located in 3\ different continents. Our experiments show that SeLeCT achieves\ overall accuracy close to 98\%. Unlike state-of-art classifiers, the\ biggest advantage of SeLeCT is its ability to help discovering\ new protocols and applications in an almost automated fashion.

}, doi = {10.1109/INFCOMW.2013.6562900}, author = {Luigi Grimaudo and Marco Mellia and Elena Baralis and Ram Keralapura} } @article {Mar2013a, title = {Standardizing large-scale measurement platforms}, journal = {SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev.}, volume = {43}, year = {2013}, pages = {58{\textendash}63}, keywords = {design, ietf, measurement platforms, standardization}, issn = {0146-4833}, doi = {10.1145/2479957.2479967}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2479957.2479967}, author = {Bagnulo Marcelo and Eardley Philip and Burbridge Trevor and Brian Trammell and Rolf Winter} } @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} } @article {Tra2013a, title = {Use Case Elaboration and Requirements Specification}, number = {D1.1}, year = {2013}, month = {01/2013}, institution = {mPlane Consortium}, type = {Public Deliverable}, address = {Torino}, abstract = {

The document defines the requirements for the mPlane architecture on the background of a set of scenarios explored by the consortium, a survey of existing comparable measurement systems and platforms and applicable standards therefore, and a set of architectural first principles drawn from the description of work and the consortium{\textquoteright}s experience.\ As mPlane is intended to be a fully flexible measurement platform, freely integrating existing probes and repositories with ones to be developed in the project, this document is primarily concerned with the definition of interfaces among mPlane components. While it does enumerate capabilities to be provided by these components, these are primarily intended to ensure the platform has the flexibility required to meet all the scenarios envisioned; the enumerations of measurements, metrics, data types, and other component capabilities are therefore not to be construed to limit the scope of work on components within the project to just those scenarios treated in this document; nor do the scenarios enumerated here define the capabilities to be demonstrated in the project{\textquoteright}s integrated trial.\ 

}, keywords = {architecture, measurement, platform, scenario, use case}, issn = {D1.1}, author = {Brian Trammell and Stephan Neuhaus and Francesco Matera and Ernst Biersack and Antonio Barbuzzi and Saverio Niccolini and Mohamed Ahmed and Maurizio Dusi and Tivadar Szemethy and Balazs Szabo and P. Casas and A B{\"a}r and Konstantina Papagiannaki and Yan Grunenberger and Ilias Leontiadis and Rolf Winter and Zied Ben-Houidi and Giovanna Carofiglio and Samir Ghamri-Doudane and Diego Perino and D Rossi} } @inproceedings {Ber2012, title = {DNS to the rescue: Discerning Content and Services in a Tangled Web}, booktitle = {Internet Measurement Conference 2012}, volume = {1}, year = {2012}, month = {11/2012}, pages = {413-426}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, edition = {ACM}, address = {Boston, MA}, abstract = {

A careful perusal of the Internet evolution reveals two major trends - explosion of cloud-based services and video stream- ing applications. In both of the above cases, the owner (e.g., CNN, YouTube, or Zynga) of the content and the organiza- tion serving it (e.g., Akamai, Limelight, or Amazon EC2) are decoupled, thus making it harder to understand the associ- ation between the content, owner, and the host where the content resides. This has created a tangled world wide web that is very hard to unwind, impairing ISPs{\textquoteright} and network administrators{\textquoteright} capabilities to control the traffic flowing in their networks.

In this paper, we present DN-Hunter, a system that lever- ages the information provided by DNS traffic to discern the tangle. Parsing through DNS queries, DN-Hunter tags traf- fic flows with the associated domain name. This association has several applications and reveals a large amount of use- ful information: (i) Provides a fine-grained traffic visibility even when the traffic is encrypted (i.e., TLS/SSL flows), thus enabling more effective policy controls, (ii) Identifies flows even before the flows begin, thus providing superior net- work management capabilities to administrators, (iii) Un- derstand and track (over time) different CDNs and cloud providers that host content for a particular resource, (iv) Discern all the services/content hosted by a given CDN or cloud provider in a particular geography and time interval, and (v) Provides insights into all applications/services run- ning on any given layer-4 port number.

We conduct extensive experimental analysis and show re- sults from real traffic traces (including FTTH and 4G ISPs) that support our hypothesis. Simply put, the information provided by DNS traffic is one of the key components re- quired for understanding the tangled web, and bringing the ability to effectively manage network traffic back to the op- erators.\ 

}, keywords = {DNS, mPlane, passive measurement, WP2}, isbn = {978-1-4503-1705-4}, doi = {10.1145/2398776.2398819}, url = {http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2398776.2398819\&coll=DL\&dl=GUIDE\&CFID=225051145\&CFTOKEN=42401286}, author = {Ignacio Nicolas Bermudez and Marco Mellia and Maurizio M Munafo{\textquoteright} and Ram Keralapura and Antonio Nucci} } @inproceedings {Dra2012, title = {Inside Dropbox: Understanding Personal Cloud Storage Services}, booktitle = {Internet Measurement Conference - IMC}, year = {2012}, month = {11/2012}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {Boston, MA}, abstract = {

Personal cloud storage services are gaining popularity. With a rush of providers to enter the market and an increasing of- fer of cheap storage space, it is to be expected that cloud storage will soon generate a high amount of Internet traffic. Very little is known about the architecture and the perfor- mance of such systems, and the workload they have to face. This understanding is essential for designing efficient cloud storage systems and predicting their impact on the network.

This paper presents a characterization of Dropbox, the leading solution in personal cloud storage in our datasets. By means of passive measurements, we analyze data from four vantage points in Europe, collected during 42 consecu- tive days. Our contributions are threefold: Firstly, we are the first to study Dropbox, which we show to be the most widely-used cloud storage system, already accounting for a volume equivalent to around one third of the YouTube traffic at campus networks on some days. Secondly, we character- ize the workload users in different environments generate to the system, highlighting how this reflects on network traf- fic. Lastly, our results show possible performance bottle- necks caused by both the current system architecture and the storage protocol. This is exacerbated for users connected far from storage data-centers.

All measurements used in our analyses are publicly avail- able in anonymized form at the SimpleWeb trace repository: http://traces.simpleweb.org/dropbox/

}, keywords = {Dropbox, passive measurement}, issn = {978-1-4503-1705-4}, doi = {10.1145/2398776.2398827}, url = {http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2398776.2398827\&coll=DL\&dl=GUIDE\&CFID=225051145\&CFTOKEN=42401286}, author = {Idilio Drago and Marco Mellia and Maurizio M Munafo{\textquoteright} and Anna Sperotto and Ramin Sadre and Aiko Pras} } @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}} }