28 research outputs found
Signalling Storms in 3G Mobile Networks
We review the characteristics of signalling storms that have been caused by
certain common apps and recently observed in cellular networks, leading to
system outages. We then develop a mathematical model of a mobile user's
signalling behaviour which focuses on the potential of causing such storms, and
represent it by a large Markov chain. The analysis of this model allows us to
determine the key parameters of mobile user device behaviour that can lead to
signalling storms. We then identify the parameter values that will lead to
worst case load for the network itself in the presence of such storms. This
leads to explicit results regarding the manner in which individual mobile
behaviour can cause overload conditions on the network and its signalling
servers, and provides insight into how this may be avoided.Comment: IEEE ICC 2014 - Communications and Information Systems Security
Symposiu
Modeling a new Startup Algorithm for TCP New Reno
Peer reviewedPublisher PD
Mobile network anomaly detection and mitigation: The NEMESYS approach
Mobile malware and mobile network attacks are becoming a significant threat that accompanies the increasing popularity of smart phones and tablets. Thus in this paper we present our research vision that aims to develop a network-based security solution combining analytical modelling, simulation and learning, together with billing and control-plane data, to detect anomalies and attacks, and eliminate or mitigate their effects, as part of the EU FP7 NEMESYS project. These ideas are supplemented with a careful review of the state-of-the-art regarding anomaly detection techniques that mobile network operators may use to protect their infrastructure and secure users against malware
A Multi-perspective Analysis of Carrier-Grade NAT Deployment
As ISPs face IPv4 address scarcity they increasingly turn to network address
translation (NAT) to accommodate the address needs of their customers.
Recently, ISPs have moved beyond employing NATs only directly at individual
customers and instead begun deploying Carrier-Grade NATs (CGNs) to apply
address translation to many independent and disparate endpoints spanning
physical locations, a phenomenon that so far has received little in the way of
empirical assessment. In this work we present a broad and systematic study of
the deployment and behavior of these middleboxes. We develop a methodology to
detect the existence of hosts behind CGNs by extracting non-routable IP
addresses from peer lists we obtain by crawling the BitTorrent DHT. We
complement this approach with improvements to our Netalyzr troubleshooting
service, enabling us to determine a range of indicators of CGN presence as well
as detailed insights into key properties of CGNs. Combining the two data
sources we illustrate the scope of CGN deployment on today's Internet, and
report on characteristics of commonly deployed CGNs and their effect on end
users
ABC: A Simple Explicit Congestion Controller for Wireless Networks
We propose Accel-Brake Control (ABC), a simple and deployable explicit
congestion control protocol for network paths with time-varying wireless links.
ABC routers mark each packet with an "accelerate" or "brake", which causes
senders to slightly increase or decrease their congestion windows. Routers use
this feedback to quickly guide senders towards a desired target rate. ABC
requires no changes to header formats or user devices, but achieves better
performance than XCP. ABC is also incrementally deployable; it operates
correctly when the bottleneck is a non-ABC router, and can coexist with non-ABC
traffic sharing the same bottleneck link. We evaluate ABC using a Wi-Fi
implementation and trace-driven emulation of cellular links. ABC achieves
30-40% higher throughput than Cubic+Codel for similar delays, and 2.2X lower
delays than BBR on a Wi-Fi path. On cellular network paths, ABC achieves 50%
higher throughput than Cubic+Codel