@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} } @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: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 {Seu2015a, title = {On the Monitoring of YouTube QoE in Cellular Networks from End-devices}, booktitle = {Seventh ACM S3 Workshop}, year = {2015}, author = {Michael Seufert and Florian Wamser and Pedro Casas and Ralf Irmer and Phuoc Tran-Gia and Raimund Schatz} } @inproceedings {Tra2015, title = {A New Transport Encapsulation for Middlebox Cooperation}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications and Networking}, year = {2015}, month = {Oct}, address = {Tokyo, Japan}, author = {Brian Trammell and Mirja Kuehlewind and Elio Gubser and Joe Hildebrand} } @inproceedings {Tra2015a, title = {Observing Internet Path Transparency to Support Protocol Engineering}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the first IRTF/ISOC Workshop on Research and Applications of Internet Measurements (RAIM)}, year = {2015}, month = {Oct}, address = {Yokohama, Japan}, author = {Brian Trammell and Mirja K{\"u}hlewind} } @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} } @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 {Thi2015a, title = {Tracking Middleboxes in the Mobile World with TraceboxAndroid}, booktitle = {7th International Workshop on Traffic Monitoring and Analysis (TMA)}, year = {2015}, month = {04/2015}, abstract = {

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

}, keywords = {Android, tracebox}, author = {Valentin Thirion and Korian Edeline and Benoit Donnet} } @inproceedings {Wam2015a, title = {Understanding YouTube QoE in Cellular Networks with YoMoApp - a QoE Monitoring Tool for YouTube Mobile}, booktitle = {ACM MOBICOM}, year = {2015}, author = {Florian Wamser and Michael Seufert and Pedro Casas and Ralf Irmer and Phuoc Tran-Gia and Raimund Schatz} } @inproceedings {Wam2015, title = {YoMoApp: a Tool for Analyzing QoE of YouTube HTTP Adaptive Streaming in Mobile Networks}, booktitle = {European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC)}, year = {2015}, author = {Florian Wamser and Michael Seufert and Pedro Casas and Ralf Irmer and Phuoc Tran-Gia and Raimund Schatz} } @inproceedings {Seu2015, title = {YouTube QoE on Mobile Devices: Subjective Analysis of Classical vs. Adaptive Video Streaming}, booktitle = {6th International Workshop on Traffic Analysis and Characterization (TRAC)}, year = {2015}, author = {Michael Seufert and Florian Wamser and Pedro Casas and Ralf Irmer and Phuoc Tran-Gia and Raimund Schatz} } @inproceedings {E.2014, title = {Active measurements and limitations of TCP protocol during SLA test}, booktitle = {Poster session the Sixth Workshop on Traffic and Monitoring Analysis (TMA)}, year = {2014}, month = {04/2014}, author = {Edion Tego} } @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 {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} } @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 {DR:COMNET-14a, title = {Delay-based congestion control: Flow vs. BitTorrent swarm perspectives}, journal = {Elsevier Computer Networks}, volume = {60}, year = {2014}, month = {02/2014}, chapter = {115 -- 128}, abstract = {

BitTorrent, one of the most widespread file-sharing P2P applications, recently introduced LEDBAT, a novel congestion control protocol aiming at (i) limiting the additional delay due to queuing, to reduce interference with the rest of user traffic (e.g., Web, VoIP and gaming) sharing the same access bottleneck, and (ii) efficiently using the available link capacity, to provide users with good BitTorrent performance at the same time. In this work, we adopt two complementary perspectives: namely, a flow viewpoint to assess the Quality of Service (QoS) as in classic congestion control studies, and a BitTorrent swarm viewpoint to assess peer-to-peer users Quality of Experience (QoE). We additionally point out that congestion control literature is rich of protocols, such as VEGAS, LP, and NICE sharing similarities with LEDBAT, that is therefore mandatory to consider in the analysis. Hence, adopting the above viewpoints we both (i) contrast LEDBAT to the other protocols and (ii) provide deep understanding of the novel protocol and its implication on QoS and QoE. Our simulation based investigation yields several insights. At flow-level, we gather LEDBAT to be lowest priority among all protocols, which follows from its design that strives to explicitly bound the queuing delay at the bottleneck link to a maximum target value. At the same time, we see that this very same protocol parameter can be exploited by adversaries, that can set a higher target to gain an unfair advantage over competitors. Interestingly, swarm-level performance exhibit an opposite trade-off, with smaller targets being more advantageous for QoE of BitTorrent users. This can be explained with the fact that larger delay targets slow down BitTorrent signaling task, with possibly negative effect on the swarming protocol efficiency. Additionally, we see that for the above reason, in heterogeneous swarms, any delay-based protocol (i.e., not only LEDBAT but also VEGAS or NICE) can yield a competitive QoE advantage over loss-based TCP. Overall this tension between swarm and flow-levels suggests that, at least in current ADSL/cable access bottleneck scenarios, a safe LEDBAT operational point may be used in practice. At the same time, our results also point out that benefits similar to LEDBAT can also be gathered with other delay-based protocols such as VEGAS or NICE.

}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi14comnet-a.pdf}, author = {Claudio Testa and Dario Rossi} } @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}} } @article {Tra2014a, title = {Evolving Transport in the Internet}, journal = {IEEE Internet Computing}, year = {2014}, month = {09/2014}, abstract = {

The Internet{\textquoteright}s transport layer has seen little evolution over the past three decades, despite wildly changing requirements. Commonly-deployed transport protocols lack diversity, reducing our ability to evolve them to meet these new application requirements. In this work, the authors describe aspects of this problem and propose a solution space and agenda for improving the situation.

}, author = {Brian Trammell}, editor = {Joe Hildebrand} } @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} } @article {DR:COMNET-14b, title = {{Fighting the bufferbloat: on the coexistence of AQM and low priority congestion control (extended version)}}, journal = {Elsevier Computer Networks}, volume = {60}, year = {2014}, chapter = {115--128}, abstract = {

Nowadays, due to excessive queuing, delays on the Internet can grow longer than the round trip time between the Moon and the Earth {\textendash} for which the {\textquoteleft}{\textquoteleft}bufferbloa t{\textquoteright}{\textquoteright} term was recently coined. Some point to active queue management (AQM) as the solution. Others propose end-to-end low-priority congestion control techniques (LPCC). Under both approaches, promising advances have been made in recent times: notable examples are CoDel for AQM, and LEDBAT for LPCC. In this paper, we warn of a potentially fateful interaction when AQM and LPCC techniques are combined: namely, AQM resets the relative level of priority between best-effort and low-priority congestion control protocols. We validate the generality of our findings by an extended set of experiments with packet-level ns2 simulation, considering 5 AQM techniques and 3 LPCC protocols, and carry on a thorough sensitivity analysis varying several parameters of the networking scenario. We complete the simulation via an experimental campaign conducted on both controlled testbeds and on the Internet, confirming the reprioritization issue to hold in the real world at least under all combination of AQM policies and LPCC protocols available in the Linux kernel. To promote cross-comparison, we make our scripts and dataset available to the research community.

}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi14comnet-b.pdf}, author = {YiXi Gong and Dario Rossi and Claudio Testa and Silvio Valenti and Dave Taht} } @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 {Tra2014, title = {Inline Data Integrity Signals for Passive Measurement}, booktitle = {Sixth International Workshop on Traffic Monitoring and Analysis (TMA 2014)}, year = {2014}, month = {04/2014}, abstract = {

In passive network measurement, the quality of an observed traffic stream is obviously crucial to the quality of the results. Some sources of error (e.g., packet loss at a capture device) are well understood, others less so. In this work, we describe the inline data integrity measurement provided by the QoF TCP-aware flow meter. By instrumenting the data structures QoF uses for detecting lost and retransmitted TCP segments, we can provide an in-band, per-flow estimate of observation loss: segments which were received by the recipient but not observed by the flow meter. We evaluate this mechanism against controlled, induced error, and apply it to two data sets used in previous work.

}, author = {Brian Trammell and David Gugelmann and Nevil Brownlee} } @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} } @article {rfc7119, title = {Operation of the IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) Protocol on IPFIX Mediators (RFC 7119)}, year = {2014}, month = {02/2014}, abstract = {
This document specifies the operation of the IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) protocol specific to IPFIX Mediators, including Template and Observation Point management, timing considerations, and other Mediator-specific concerns.
}, url = {http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc7119.txt}, author = {B. Claise and A. Kobayashi and B. Trammell} } @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} } @article {rfc7125, title = {Revision of the tcpControlBits IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) Information Element (RFC 7125)}, year = {2014}, month = {02/2014}, abstract = {
This document revises the tcpControlBits IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) Information Element as originally defined in RFC 5102 to reflect changes to the TCP Flags header field since RFC 793.
}, url = {http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc7125.txt}, author = {B. Trammell and P. Aitken} } @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 {Tes2013, title = {Data Plane Throughput vs Control Plane Delay: Experimental Study of BitTorrent Performance}, booktitle = {IEEE P2P{\textquoteright}XIII}, year = {2013}, month = {09/2013}, abstract = {In this paper, we address the trade-off between the data plane efficiency and the control plane timeliness for the BitTorrent performance. We argue that loss-based congestion control protocols can fill large buffers, leading to a higher end-to-end delay, unlike low-priority or delay-based congestion control protocols. We perform experiments for both the uTorrent and mainline BitTorrent clients, and we study the impact of uTP (a novel transport protocol proposed by BitTorrent) and several TCP congestion control algorithms (Cubic, New Reno, LP, Vegas and Nice) on the download completion time. Briefly, in case peers in the swarm all use the same congestion control algorithm, we observe that the specific algorithm has only a limited impact on the swarm performance. Conversely, when a mix of TCP congestion control algorithms coexists, peers employing a delay-based low-priority algorithm exhibit shorter completion time.}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi13p2p-a.pdf}, author = {C. Testa and D Rossi and A. Rao and A. Legout} } @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}} } @inproceedings {Gon2013, title = {Fighting the bufferbloat: on the coexistence of AQM and low priority congestion control}, booktitle = {IEEE INFOCOM Workshop on Traffic Monitoring and Analysis (TMA{\textquoteright}13)}, year = {2013}, keywords = {Bufferbloat}, doi = {10.1109/INFCOM.2013.6567153}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi13tma-b.pdf}, author = {YiXi Gong and D Rossi and C. Testa and S. Valenti and D. Taht} } @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 {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 {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} } @article {Tra2013b, title = {python-ipfix-0.9.1}, year = {2013}, abstract = {

This module provides a Python interface to IPFIX message streams, and provides tools for building IPFIX Exporting and Collecting Processes. It handles message framing and deframing, encoding and decoding IPFIX data records using templates, and a bridge between IPFIX ADTs and appropriate Python data types.\ 

}, url = {http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ipfix}, author = {Brian Trammell} } @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} } @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 {Kue2013, title = {On the state of ECN and TCP Options on the Internet}, booktitle = {Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM)}, year = {2013}, month = {03/2013}, address = {Hong Kong}, abstract = {

Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) is a TCP/IP extension that can avoid packet loss and thus improve network performance. Though standardized in 2001, it is barely used in today{\textquoteright}s Internet. This study, following on previous active measurement studies over the past decade, shows marked and continued increase in the deployment of ECN-capable servers, and usability of ECN on the majority of paths to such servers. We additionally present new measurements of ECN on IPv6, passive observation of actual ECN usage from flow data, and observations on other congestion-relevant TCP options (SACK, Timestamps and Window Scaling). We further present initial work on burst loss metrics for loss-based congestion control following from our findings.\ 

}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-36516-4_14}, author = {Mirja Kuehlewind and Sebastian Neuner and Brian Trammell} } @article {Tra2013, title = {Temporal locality in today{\textquoteright}s content caching: why it matters and how to model it}, journal = {ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review}, volume = {43}, year = {2013}, month = {10/2013}, chapter = {5}, abstract = {

The dimensioning of caching systems represents a difficult task in the design of infrastructures for content distribution in the current Internet. This paper addresses the problem of defining a realistic arrival process for the content requests generated by users, due its critical importance for both analytical and simulative evaluations of the performance of caching systems. First, with the aid of YouTube traces collected inside operational residential networks, we identify the characteristics of real traffic that need to be considered or can be safely neglected in order to accurately predict the performance of a cache. Second, we propose a new parsimonious traffic model, named the Shot Noise Model (SNM), that enables users to natively capture the dynamics of content popularity, whilst still being suf- ficiently simple to be employed effectively for both analytical and scalable simulative studies of caching systems. Finally, our results show that the SNM presents a much better solution to account for the temporal locality observed in real traffic compared to existing approaches.

}, doi = {10.1145/2541468.2541470}, author = {Stefano Traverso and Mohamed Ahmed and Michele Garetto and Paolo Giaccone and Emilio Leonardi and Saverio Niccolini} } @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 {Tra2012, title = {On Flow Concurrency in the Internet and its Implications for Capacity Sharing}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Second ACM CoNext Capacity Sharing Workshop (CSWS)}, year = {2012}, month = {12/2012}, address = {Nice, France}, doi = {10.1145/2413219.2413225}, author = {Brian Trammell and Dominik Schatzmann} } @inproceedings {Gon2012, title = {Interaction or Interference: can AQM and Low Priority Congestion Control Successfully Collaborate}, booktitle = {ACM CoNEXT, Extended Abstract}, year = {2012}, month = {12/2012}, abstract = {

Heterogeneity in the Internet ecosystem sometimes turns interaction into interference. Over the years, active queue management (AQM) and end-to-end low-priority congestion control (LPCC) have been proposed as alternative solutions to counter the persistently full buffer problem -- that recently became popular under the {\textquoteleft}{\textquoteleft}bufferbloat{\textquoteright}{\textquoteright} term. In this work, we point out the existence of a negative interplay among AQM and LPCC techniques. Intuitively, as AQM is designed to penalize the most aggressive flows it mainly hit best effort TCP: it follows that LPCC is not able to maintain its low priority, thus becoming as aggressive as TCP. By an extended set of simulation on various AQM policies and LPCC protocols, including the very recent CoDel AQM and LEDBAT LPCC proposals, we point out that this interference is quite universal and deserves further attention.

}, doi = {10.1145/2413247.2413263}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/drossi/paper/rossi12conext.pdf}, author = {YiXi Gong and D Rossi and C. Testa and S. Valenti and D. Taht} }