Survey of End-to-End Mobile Network Measurement Testbeds, Tools, and Services

Mobile (cellular) networks enable innovation, but can also stifle it and lead to user frustration when network performance falls below expectations. As mobile networks become the predominant method of Internet access, developer, research, network operator, and regulatory communities have taken an increased interest in measuring end-to-end mobile network performance to, among other goals, minimize negative impact on application responsiveness. In this survey we examine current approaches to end-to-end mobile network performance measurement, diagnosis, and application prototyping. We compare available tools and their shortcomings with respect to the needs of researchers, developers, regulators, and the public. We intend for this survey to provide a comprehensive view of currently active efforts and some auspicious directions for future work in mobile network measurement and mobile application performance evaluation.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. arXiv does not format the URL references correctly. For a correctly formatted version of this paper go to http://www.cs.montana.edu/mwittie/publications/Goel14Survey.pd

Inferring Network Usage from Passive Measurements in ISP Networks: Bringing Visibility of the Network to Internet Operators

The Internet is evolving with us along the time, nowadays people are more dependent of it, being used for most of the simple activities of their lives. It is not uncommon use the Internet for voice and video communications, social networking, banking and shopping. Current trends in Internet applications such as Web 2.0, cloud computing, and the internet of things are bound to bring higher traffic volume and more heterogeneous traffic. In addition, privacy concerns and network security traits have widely promoted the usage of encryption on the network communications. All these factors make network management an evolving environment that becomes every day more difficult. This thesis focuses on helping to keep track on some of these changes, observing the Internet from an ISP viewpoint and exploring several aspects of the visibility of a network, giving insights on what contents or services are retrieved by customers and how these contents are provided to them. Generally, inferring these information, it is done by means of characterization and analysis of data collected using passive traffic monitoring tools on operative networks. As said, analysis and characterization of traffic collected passively is challenging. Internet end-users are not controlled on the network traffic they generate. Moreover, this traffic in the network might be encrypted or coded in a way that is unfeasible to decode, creating the need for reverse engineering for providing a good picture to the Internet operator. In spite of the challenges, it is presented a characterization of P2P-TV usage of a commercial, proprietary and closed application, that encrypts or encodes its traffic, making quite difficult discerning what is going on by just observing the data carried by the protocol. Then it is presented DN-Hunter, which is an application for rendering visible a great part of the network traffic even when encryption or encoding is available. Finally, it is presented a case study of DNHunter for understanding Amazon Web Services, the most prominent cloud provider that offers computing, storage, and content delivery platforms. In this paper is unveiled the infrastructure, the pervasiveness of content and their traffic allocation policies. Findings reveal that most of the content residing on cloud computing and Internet storage infrastructures is served by one single Amazon datacenter located in Virginia despite it appears to be the worst performing one for Italian users. This causes traffic to take long and expensive paths in the network. Since no automatic migration and load-balancing policies are offered by AWS among different locations, content is exposed to outages, as it is observed in the datasets presented

DNS to the rescue: Discerning Content and Services in a Tangled Web

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 asso- ciation 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' and network ad- ministrators' capabilities to control the traffic flowing on the network. 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 traffic flows with the associated domain name. This association has several applications and reveals a large amount of useful in- formation: (i) Provides a fine-grained traffic visibility even when the traffic is encrypted (i.e., TLS/SSL flows), thus en- abling 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, and (v) Provides insights into all applications/services running on any given layer-4 port number. We conduct extensive experimental analysis and show that the results from real traffic traces, ranging from FTTH to 4G ISPs, that support our hypothesis. Simply put, the informa- tion provided by DNS traffic is one of the key components required to unveil the tangled web, and bring the capabilities of controlling the traffic back to the network carrier

Waterfall Traffic Classification: A Quick Approach to Optimizing Cascade Classifiers

Heterogeneous wireless communication networks, like 4G LTE, transport diverse kinds of IP traffic: voice, video, Internet data, and more. In order to effectively manage such networks, administrators need adequate tools, of which traffic classification is the basis for visualizing, shaping, and filtering the broad streams of IP packets observed nowadays. In this paper, we describe a modular, cascading traffic classification system—the Waterfall architecture—and we extensively describe a novel technique for its optimization—in terms of CPU time, number of errors, and percentage of unrecognized flows. We show how to significantly accelerate the process of exhaustive search for the best performing cascade. We employ five datasets of real Internet transmissions and seven traffic analysis methods to demonstrate that our proposal yields valid results and outperforms a greedy optimizer

An interoperable and secure architecture for internet-scale decentralized personal communication

Interpersonal network communications, including Voice over IP (VoIP) and Instant Messaging (IM), are increasingly popular communications tools. However, systems to date have generally adopted a client-server model, requiring complex centralized infrastructure, or have not adhered to any VoIP or IM standard. Many deployment scenarios either require no central equipment, or due to unique properties of the deployment, are limited or rendered unattractive by central servers. to address these scenarios, we present a solution based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standard, utilizing a decentralized Peer-to-Peer (P2P) mechanism to distribute data. Our new approach, P2PSIP, enables users to communicate with minimal or no centralized servers, while providing secure, real-time, authenticated communications comparable in security and performance to centralized solutions.;We present two complete protocol descriptions and system designs. The first, the SOSIMPLE/dSIP protocol, is a P2P-over-SIP solution, utilizing SIP both for the transport of P2P messages and personal communications, yielding an interoperable, single-stack solution for P2P communications. The RELOAD protocol is a binary P2P protocol, designed for use in a SIP-using-P2P architecture where an existing SIP application is modified to use an additional, binary RELOAD stack to distribute user information without need for a central server.;To meet the unique security needs of a fully decentralized communications system, we propose an enrollment-time certificate authority model that provides asserted identity and strong P2P and user-level security. In this model, a centralized server is contacted only at enrollment time. No run-time connections to the servers are required.;Additionally, we show that traditional P2P message routing mechanisms are inappropriate for P2PSIP. The existing mechanisms are generally optimized for file sharing and neglect critical practical elements of the open Internet --- namely link-level security and asymmetric connectivity caused by Network Address Translators (NATs). In response to these shortcomings, we introduce a new message routing paradigm, Adaptive Routing (AR), and using both analytical models and simulation show that AR significantly improves message routing performance for P2PSIP systems.;Our work has led to the creation of a new research topic within the P2P and interpersonal communications communities, P2PSIP. Our seminal publications have provided the impetus for subsequent P2PSIP publications, for the listing of P2PSIP as a topic in conference calls for papers, and for the formation of a new working group in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), directed to develop an open Internet standard for P2PSIP

Media Processing in Video Conferences for Cooperating Over the Top and Operator Based Networks

Telecom operators have dominated the communication industry for a long time by providing services with guaranteed quality of service. Such services are provided by the operator at the cost of maintaining a high grade network. With the introduction of broadband and internet, many over the top (OTT) services have emerged. These services use the underlying operator networks as a mere bit pipe while all service intelligence resides in the application running on the client device. Introduction of OTT services has seen a good response from general users who are no longer bound to services provided by the network operator. This in turn has caused operators and telecom companies to loose the ownership of their customers. This thesis takes media processing in video conferencing as a case study to compare the two competing domains of operator networks and OTT networks. Both domains offer video conferencing to end users, but they follow different architectures. The study shows that OTT services can perform much better if they utilize support of the underlying network. This will also bring the user base back to the network operator. The proposal is to turn the competition into cooperation between both parties. Assessments are done from both technical as well as business perspectives to assert that such cooperative agreements are possible and should be experimented in real life

A framework for the dynamic management of Peer-to-Peer overlays

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications have been associated with inefficient operation, interference with other network services and large operational costs for network providers. This thesis presents a framework which can help ISPs address these issues by means of intelligent management of peer behaviour. The proposed approach involves limited control of P2P overlays without interfering with the fundamental characteristics of peer autonomy and decentralised operation. At the core of the management framework lays the Active Virtual Peer (AVP). Essentially intelligent peers operated by the network providers, the AVPs interact with the overlay from within, minimising redundant or inefficient traffic, enhancing overlay stability and facilitating the efficient and balanced use of available peer and network resources. They offer an “insider‟s” view of the overlay and permit the management of P2P functions in a compatible and non-intrusive manner. AVPs can support multiple P2P protocols and coordinate to perform functions collectively. To account for the multi-faceted nature of P2P applications and allow the incorporation of modern techniques and protocols as they appear, the framework is based on a modular architecture. Core modules for overlay control and transit traffic minimisation are presented. Towards the latter, a number of suitable P2P content caching strategies are proposed. Using a purpose-built P2P network simulator and small-scale experiments, it is demonstrated that the introduction of AVPs inside the network can significantly reduce inter-AS traffic, minimise costly multi-hop flows, increase overlay stability and load-balancing and offer improved peer transfer performance

The Internet Ecosystem: The Potential for Discrimination

Symposium: Rough Consensus and Running Code: Integrating Engineering Principles into Internet Policy Debates, held at the University of Pennsylvania\u27s Center for Technology Innovation and Competition on May 6-7, 2010. This Article explores how the emerging Internet architecture of cloud computing, content distribution networks, private peering and data-center services can simultaneously foster a perception of unfair network access while at the same time enabling significant competition for services, content, and innovation. A key enabler of these changes is the emergence of technologies that lower the barrier for entry in developing and deploying new services. Another is the design of successful Internet applications, which already accommodate the variation in service afforded by the current Internet. Regulators should be aware of the potential for anti-competitive practices in this broader Internet Ecosystem, but should carefully consider the effects of regulation on that ecosystem