@article {D61, title = {Demonstration Plan}, number = {D6.1}, year = {2015}, month = {01/2015}, type = {Public Deliverable}, issn = {D6.1}, author = {Pedro Casas and Edion Tego and Francesco Matera and Maurizio Dusi and A. Bakay and Balazs Szabo and G. Rozsa and Stefano Traverso and Ilias Leontiadis and L. Baltrunas and Yan Grunenberger and Andrea Fregosi and A. Kahveci and Eike Kowallik and G. Mattellini and C. Meregalli and Stefano Raffaglio and M. Russo and Andrea Sannino and M. Scarpino} } @inproceedings {Pap2015a, title = {Distributed Monitoring Problem}, booktitle = {7th International Network Optimization Conference (INOC) 2015}, year = {2015}, author = {Dimitri Papadimitriou and Bernard Fortz} } @inproceedings {Bae2014, title = {DBStream: an Online Aggregation, Filtering and Processing System for Network Traffic Monitoring}, booktitle = {TRAC}, year = {2014}, month = {08/2014}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Nicosia, Cyprus}, author = {Arian Baer and Pedro Casas and Lukasz Golab and Alessandro Finamore} } @article {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} } @inproceedings {Fia2014, title = {On the Detection of Network Traffic Anomalies in Content Delivery Network Services}, booktitle = {ITC26}, year = {2014}, month = {09/2014}, address = {Karlskrona, Sweden}, author = {Pierdomenico Fiadino and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and Arian B{\"a}r and Alessandro Finamore and Pedro Casas} } @inproceedings {Schiavone:2014:DDA:2680821.2680831, title = {Diagnosing Device-Specific Anomalies in Cellular Networks}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2014 CoNEXT on Student Workshop}, year = {2014}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, keywords = {anomaly diagnosis, cellular networks., entropy-based analysis}, isbn = {978-1-4503-3282-8}, doi = {10.1145/2680821.2680831}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2680821.2680831}, author = {Schiavone, Mirko and Romirer-Maierhofer, Peter and Fiadino, Pierdomenico and Casas, Pedro} } @inproceedings {Cas2014a, title = {Distributed active measurement of Internet queuing delays}, booktitle = {Passive and Active Measurement (PAM), Extended Abstract}, year = {2014}, month = {March}, address = {Los Angeles, USA}, abstract = {

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

}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi14pam-b.pdf}, author = {P. Casoria and D Rossi and Jordan Aug{\'e} and Marc-Oliver Buob and T. Friedman and A. Pescape} } @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 {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 {Bar2013a, title = {Database Layer Design}, number = {D3.2}, year = {2013}, month = {11/2013}, institution = {mPlane Consortium}, type = {Public Deliverable}, address = {Torino}, keywords = {big data, databases, repositories, storage}, issn = {D3.2}, author = {A B{\"a}r and P. Casas and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and Alessandro Finamore and Antonio Barbuzzi and Maurizio Dusi and Gianni De Rosa and Tivadar Szemethy and Ilias Leontiadis and D Rossi and Jordan Aug{\'e} and Marc-Oliver Buob} } @article {Pap2013, title = {Design of Analysis Modules}, number = {D4.1}, year = {2013}, month = {11/2013}, institution = {mPlane Consortium}, type = {Public Deliverable}, address = {Torino}, keywords = {algorithms, analysis}, isbn = {D4.1}, issn = {D4.1}, author = {Dimitri Papadimitriou and Zied Ben-Houidi and Samir Ghamri-Doudane and D Rossi and M. Milanesio and P. Casas and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and Edion Tego and Francesco Matera and Maurizio Dusi and Tivadar Szemethy and L. M{\'a}th{\'e} and Alessandro Finamore and Stefano Traverso and Ilias Leontiadis and Yan Grunenberger and L. Baltrunas and Benoit Donnet and Guy Leduc and Y. Liao} } @inproceedings {Ara2013, title = {Dissecting Bufferbloat: Measurement and Per-Application Breakdown of Queueing Delay}, booktitle = {ACM CoNEXT{\textquoteright}13, Student Workshop}, year = {2013}, abstract = {

We propose a passive methodology to estimate the queueing delay incurred by TCP traffic, and additionally leverage DPI classification to breakdown the delay across different applications. Ultimately, we correlate the queueing delay to the performance perceived by the users of that applications, depending on their delay-sensitivity. We implement our methodology in Tstat, and make it available 1 as open source software to the community. We validate and tune the tool, and run a preliminary measurement campaign based on a real ISP traffic trace, showing interesting yet partly counter-intuitive results.

}, doi = {10.1145/2537148.2537785}, url = {http://www.enst.fr/~drossi/paper/rossi13conext.pdf}, author = {A. Araldo and D Rossi} } @article {Lia2013, title = {DMFSGD: A decentralized matrix factorization algorithm for network distance prediction}, journal = {IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking}, volume = {21}, year = {2013}, month = {10/2013}, chapter = {1511}, abstract = {

The knowledge of end-to-end network distances is\ essential to many Internet applications. As active probing of all\ pairwise distances is infeasible in large-scale networks, a natural\ idea is to measure a few pairs and to predict the other ones\ without actually measuring them. This paper formulates the\ prediction problem as matrix completion where the unknown\ entries in a pairwise distance matrix constructed from a network\ are to be predicted. By assuming that the distance matrix has\ a low-rank characteristics, the problem is solvable by lowrank\ approximation based on matrix factorization. The new\ formulation circumvents the well-known drawbacks of existing\ approaches based on Euclidean embedding.

A new algorithm, so-called Decentralized Matrix Factorization\ by Stochastic Gradient Descent (DMFSGD), is proposed. By\ letting network nodes exchange messages with each other, the\ algorithm is fully decentralized and only requires each node\ to collect and to process local measurements, with neither\ explicit matrix constructions nor special nodes such as landmarks\ and central servers. In addition, we compared comprehensively\ matrix factorization and Euclidean embedding to demonstrate\ the suitability of the former on network distance prediction. We\ further studied the incorporation of a robust loss function and\ of non-negativity constraints. Extensive experiments on various\ publicly-available datasets of network delays show not only the\ scalability and the accuracy of our approach, but also its usability\ in real Internet applications.

}, keywords = {matrix completion, matrix factorization, network distance prediction, stochastic gradient descent}, author = {Yongjun Liao and Wei Du and Pierre Geurts and Guy Leduc} } @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} }