COMM

Recent Internet research has been driven by two facts and their contradictory implications: the current Internet architecture is both inherently flawed (so we should explore radically different alternative designs) and deeply entrenched (so we should ...

The 4G/5G cellular edge promises low-latency experiences anywhere, anytime. However, data charging gaps can arise between the cellular operators and edge application vendors, and cause over-/under-billing. We find that such gap can come from data loss, ...

To keep up with the continuous growth in demand, cloud providers spend millions of dollars augmenting the capacity of their wide-area backbones and devote significant effort to efficiently utilizing WAN capacity. A key challenge is striking a good ...

Congestion control (CC) is the key to achieving ultra-low latency, high bandwidth and network stability in high-speed networks. From years of experience operating large-scale and high-speed RDMA networks, we find the existing high-speed CC schemes have ...

Application requirements evolve over time and the underlying protocols need to adapt. Most transport protocols evolve by negotiating protocol extensions during the handshake. Experience with TCP shows that this leads to delays of several years or more ...

Many applications in distributed systems rely on underlying lossless networks to achieve required performance. Existing lossless network solutions propose different hop-by-hop flow controls to guarantee zero packet loss. However, another crucial problem ...

Communication intensive applications in hosts with multi-core CPU and high speed networking hardware often put considerable stress on the native socket system in an OS. Existing socket replacements often leave significant performance on the table, as ...

The network communications between the cloud and the client have become the weak link for global cloud services that aim to provide low latency services to their clients. In this paper, we first characterize WAN latency from the viewpoint of a large ...

Inertial measurements are critical to almost any mobile applications. It is usually achieved by dedicated sensors (e.g., accelerometer, gyroscope) that suffer from significant accumulative errors. This paper presents RIM, an RF-based Inertial ...

Net neutrality has been the subject of considerable public debate over the past decade. Despite the potential impact on content providers and users, there is currently a lack of tools or data for stakeholders to independently audit the net neutrality ...

Weather is a leading threat to the stability of our vital infrastructure. Last-mile Internet is no exception. Yet, unlike other vital infrastructure, weather's effect on last-mile Internet outages is not well understood. This work is the first attempt ...

Quantum communication brings radically new capabilities that are provably impossible to attain in any classical network. Here, we take the first step from a physics experiment to a quantum internet system. We propose a functional allocation of a quantum ...

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), billions of new connected devices will come online, placing a huge strain on today's WiFi and cellular spectrum. This problem will be further exacerbated by the fact that many of these IoT devices are low-...

We present Piezo-Acoustic Backscatter (PAB), the first technology that enables backscatter networking in underwater environments. PAB relies on the piezoelectric effect to enable underwater communication and sensing at near-zero power. Its architecture ...

We describe our experiences using formal methods and automated theorem proving for network operation at scale. The experiences are based on developing and applying the SecGuru and RCDC (Reality Checker for Data Centers) tools in Azure. SecGuru has been ...

In-network Access Control List (ACL) is an important technique in ensuring network-wide connectivity and security. As cloud-scale WANs today constantly evolve in size and complexity, in-network ACL rules are becoming increasingly more complex. This ...

QUIC is a new Internet secure transport protocol currently in the process of IETF standardization. It is intended as a replacement for the TLS/TCP stack and will be the basis of HTTP/3, the next official version of the hypertext transfer protocol. As a ...

User demand for increasing amounts of wireless capacity continues to outpace supply, and so to meet this demand, significant progress has been made in new MIMO wireless physical layer techniques. Higher-performance systems now remain impractical largely ...

Packet classification is a fundamental problem in computer networking. This problem exposes a hard tradeoff between the computation and state complexity, which makes it particularly challenging. To navigate this tradeoff, existing solutions rely on ...

Efficiently scheduling data processing jobs on distributed compute clusters requires complex algorithms. Current systems use simple, generalized heuristics and ignore workload characteristics, since developing and tuning a scheduling policy for each ...

Conventional wisdom states that to improve quality of experience (QoE), web service providers should reduce the median or other percentiles of server-side delays. This work shows that doing so can be inefficient due to user heterogeneity in how the ...

We introduce Graphene, a method and protocol for interactive set reconciliation among peers in blockchains and related distributed systems. Through the novel combination of a Bloom filter and an Invertible Bloom Lookup Table (IBLT), Graphene uses a ...

Emerging Multicore SoC SmartNICs, enclosing rich computing resources (e.g., a multicore processor, onboard DRAM, accelerators, programmable DMA engines), hold the potential to offload generic datacenter server tasks. However, it is unclear how to use a ...

Software switches are emerging as a vital measurement vantage point in many networked systems. Sketching algorithms or sketches, provide high-fidelity approximate measurements, and appear as a promising alternative to traditional approaches such as ...

Network virtualization stacks are the linchpins of public clouds. A key goal is to provide performance isolation so that workloads on one Virtual Machine (VM) do not adversely impact the network experience of another VM. Using data from a major public ...

With increasing link speeds and slowdown in the scaling of CPU speeds, packet scheduling in software is resulting in lower precision and higher CPU utilization. By offloading packet scheduling to the hardware such as a NIC, one can potentially overcome ...

Social live video streaming (SLVS) applications are becoming increasingly popular with the rise of platforms such as Facebook-Live, YouTube-Live, Twitch and Periscope. A key characteristic that differentiates this new class of applications from ...

Streaming 360° videos requires more bandwidth than non-360° videos. This is because current solutions assume that users perceive the quality of 360° videos in the same way they perceive the quality of non-360° videos. This means the bandwidth demand ...

The growth of video traffic makes it increasingly likely that multiple clients share a bottleneck link, giving video content providers an opportunity to optimize the experience of multiple users jointly. But today's transport protocols are oblivious to ...

The performance and availability of cloud and content providers often depends on the wide area networks (WANs) they use to interconnect their datacenters. WAN routers, which connect to each other using trunks (bundles of links), are sometimes built ...

Mobile devices apply neighbor discovery (ND) protocols to wirelessly initiate a first contact within the shortest possible amount of time and with minimal energy consumption. For this purpose, over the last decade, a vast number of ND protocols have ...

We present Elmo, a system that addresses the multicast scalability problem in multi-tenant datacenters. Modern cloud applications frequently exhibit one-to-many communication patterns and, at the same time, require sub-millisecond latencies and high ...