CASPR: Judiciously Using the Cloud for Wide-Area Packet Recovery

We revisit a classic networking problem -- how to recover from lost packets in the best-effort Internet. We propose CASPR, a system that judiciously leverages the cloud to recover from lost or delayed packets. CASPR supplements and protects best-effort connections by sending a small number of coded packets along the highly reliable but expensive cloud paths. When receivers detect packet loss, they recover packets with the help of the nearby data center, not the sender, thus providing quick and reliable packet recovery for latency-sensitive applications. Using a prototype implementation and its deployment on the public cloud and the PlanetLab testbed, we quantify the benefits of CASPR in providing fast, cost effective packet recovery. Using controlled experiments, we also explore how these benefits translate into improvements up and down the network stack

The Road Ahead for Networking: A Survey on ICN-IP Coexistence Solutions

In recent years, the current Internet has experienced an unexpected paradigm shift in the usage model, which has pushed researchers towards the design of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm as a possible replacement of the existing architecture. Even though both Academia and Industry have investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of ICN, achieving the complete replacement of the Internet Protocol (IP) is a challenging task. Some research groups have already addressed the coexistence by designing their own architectures, but none of those is the final solution to move towards the future Internet considering the unaltered state of the networking. To design such architecture, the research community needs now a comprehensive overview of the existing solutions that have so far addressed the coexistence. The purpose of this paper is to reach this goal by providing the first comprehensive survey and classification of the coexistence architectures according to their features (i.e., deployment approach, deployment scenarios, addressed coexistence requirements and architecture or technology used) and evaluation parameters (i.e., challenges emerging during the deployment and the runtime behaviour of an architecture). We believe that this paper will finally fill the gap required for moving towards the design of the final coexistence architecture.Comment: 23 pages, 16 figures, 3 table

Genet: A Quickly Scalable Fat-Tree Overlay for Personal Volunteer Computing using WebRTC

WebRTC enables browsers to exchange data directly but the number of possible concurrent connections to a single source is limited. We overcome the limitation by organizing participants in a fat-tree overlay: when the maximum number of connections of a tree node is reached, the new participants connect to the node's children. Our design quickly scales when a large number of participants join in a short amount of time, by relying on a novel scheme that only requires local information to route connection messages: the destination is derived from the hash value of the combined identifiers of the message's source and of the node that is holding the message. The scheme provides deterministic routing of a sequence of connection messages from a single source and probabilistic balancing of newer connections among the leaves. We show that this design puts at least 83% of nodes at the same depth as a deterministic algorithm, can connect a thousand browser windows in 21-55 seconds in a local network, and can be deployed for volunteer computing to tap into 320 cores in less than 30 seconds on a local network to increase the total throughput on the Collatz application by two orders of magnitude compared to a single core

Octopus: A Secure and Anonymous DHT Lookup

Distributed Hash Table (DHT) lookup is a core technique in structured peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Its decentralized nature introduces security and privacy vulnerabilities for applications built on top of them; we thus set out to design a lookup mechanism achieving both security and anonymity, heretofore an open problem. We present Octopus, a novel DHT lookup which provides strong guarantees for both security and anonymity. Octopus uses attacker identification mechanisms to discover and remove malicious nodes, severely limiting an adversary's ability to carry out active attacks, and splits lookup queries over separate anonymous paths and introduces dummy queries to achieve high levels of anonymity. We analyze the security of Octopus by developing an event-based simulator to show that the attacker discovery mechanisms can rapidly identify malicious nodes with low error rate. We calculate the anonymity of Octopus using probabilistic modeling and show that Octopus can achieve near-optimal anonymity. We evaluate Octopus's efficiency on Planetlab with 207 nodes and show that Octopus has reasonable lookup latency and manageable communication overhead