Trusting (and Verifying) Online Intermediaries\u27 Policing

All is not well in the land of online self-regulation. However competently internet intermediaries police their sites, nagging questions will remain about their fairness and objectivity in doing so. Is Comcast blocking BitTorrent to stop infringement, to manage traffic, or to decrease access to content that competes with its own for viewers? How much digital due process does Google need to give a site it accuses of harboring malware? If Facebook censors a video of war carnage, is that a token of respect for the wounded or one more reflexive effort of a major company to ingratiate itself with the Washington establishment? Questions like these will persist, and erode the legitimacy of intermediary self-policing, as long as key operations of leading companies are shrouded in secrecy. Administrators must develop an institutional competence for continually monitoring rapidly-changing business practices. A trusted advisory council charged with assisting the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could help courts and agencies adjudicate controversies concerning intermediary practices. An Internet Intermediary Regulatory Council (IIRC) would spur the development of expertise necessary to understand whether companies’ controversial decisions are socially responsible or purely self-interested. Monitoring is a prerequisite for assuring a level playing field online

EXPERIMENTS ON VIDEO STREAMING OVER COMPUTER NETWORKS

Video traffic (including streaming video service) is dominating the Internet traffic today. Video can be streamed using a dedicated server, a content delivery network (CDN), or peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays across a network. Video can be transmitted in multiple formats and at different resolutions. Video is also being distributed to a variety of devices (fixed and mobile)

Sharing large data collections between mobile peers

New directions in the provision of end-user computing experiences mean that we need to determine the best way to share data between small mobile computing devices. Partitioning large structures so that they can be shared efficiently provides a basis for data-intensive applications on such platforms. In conjunction with such an approach, dictionary-based compression techniques provide additional benefits and help to prolong battery life

40 Gbps Access for Metro networks: Implications in terms of Sustainability and Innovation from an LCA Perspective

In this work, the implications of new technologies, more specifically the new optical FTTH technologies, are studied both from the functional and non-functional perspectives. In particular, some direct impacts are listed in the form of abandoning non-functional technologies, such as micro-registration, which would be implicitly required for having a functioning operation before arrival the new high-bandwidth access technologies. It is shown that such abandonment of non-functional best practices, which are mainly at the management level of ICT, immediately results in additional consumption and environmental footprint, and also there is a chance that some other new innovations might be 'missed.' Therefore, unconstrained deployment of these access technologies is not aligned with a possible sustainable ICT picture, except if they are regulated. An approach to pricing the best practices, including both functional and non-functional technologies, is proposed in order to develop a regulation and policy framework for a sustainable broadband access.Comment: 10 pages, 6 Tables, 1 Figure. Accepted to be presented at the ICT4S'15 Conferenc

EXPERIMENTS ON VIDEO STREAMING OVER COMPUTER NETWORKS

Video traffic (including streaming video service) is dominating the Internet traffic today. Video can be streamed using a dedicated server, a content delivery network (CDN), or peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays across a network. Video can be transmitted in multiple formats and at different resolutions. Video is also being distributed to a variety of devices (fixed and mobile)

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationWe propose a collective approach for harnessing the idle resources (cpu, storage, and bandwidth) of nodes (e.g., home desktops) distributed across the Internet. Instead of a purely peer-to-peer (P2P) approach, we organize participating nodes to act collectively using collective managers (CMs). Participating nodes provide idle resources to CMs, which unify these resources to run meaningful distributed services for external clients. We do not assume altruistic users or employ a barter-based incentive model; instead, participating nodes provide resources to CMs for long durations and are compensated in proportion to their contribution. In this dissertation we discuss the challenges faced by collective systems, present a design that addresses these challenges, and study the effect of selfish nodes. We believe that the collective service model is a useful alternative to the dominant pure P2P and centralized work queue models. It provides more effective utilization of idle resources, has a more meaningful economic model, and is better suited for building legal and commercial distributed services. We demonstrate the value of our work by building two distributed services using the collective approach. These services are a collective content distribution service and a collective data backup service

On applying network coding to wireless ad hoc networks : A study of robustness, efficiency and cross-layer synergy

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH