56,033 research outputs found
Characterizing and Improving the Reliability of Broadband Internet Access
In this paper, we empirically demonstrate the growing importance of
reliability by measuring its effect on user behavior. We present an approach
for broadband reliability characterization using data collected by many
emerging national initiatives to study broadband and apply it to the data
gathered by the Federal Communications Commission's Measuring Broadband America
project. Motivated by our findings, we present the design, implementation, and
evaluation of a practical approach for improving the reliability of broadband
Internet access with multihoming.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures, 6 table
Systems for characterizing Internet routing
2018 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Today the Internet plays a critical role in our lives; we rely on it for communication, business, and more recently, smart home operations. Users expect high performance and availability of the Internet. To meet such high demands, all Internet components including routing must operate at peak efficiency. However, events that hamper the routing system over the Internet are very common, causing millions of dollars of financial loss, traffic exposed to attacks, or even loss of national connectivity. Moreover, there is sparse real-time detection and reporting of such events for the public. A key challenge in addressing such issues is lack of methodology to study, evaluate and characterize Internet connectivity. While many networks operating autonomously have made the Internet robust, the complexity in understanding how users interconnect, interact and retrieve content has also increased. Characterizing how data is routed, measuring dependency on external networks, and fast outage detection has become very necessary using public measurement infrastructures and data sources. From a regulatory standpoint, there is an immediate need for systems to detect and report routing events where a content provider's routing policies may run afoul of state policies. In this dissertation, we design, build and evaluate systems that leverage existing infrastructure and report routing events in near-real time. In particular, we focus on geographic routing anomalies i.e., detours, routing failure i.e., outages, and measuring structural changes in routing policies
Twitter reciprocal reply networks exhibit assortativity with respect to happiness
The advent of social media has provided an extraordinary, if imperfect, 'big
data' window into the form and evolution of social networks. Based on nearly 40
million message pairs posted to Twitter between September 2008 and February
2009, we construct and examine the revealed social network structure and
dynamics over the time scales of days, weeks, and months. At the level of user
behavior, we employ our recently developed hedonometric analysis methods to
investigate patterns of sentiment expression. We find users' average happiness
scores to be positively and significantly correlated with those of users one,
two, and three links away. We strengthen our analysis by proposing and using a
null model to test the effect of network topology on the assortativity of
happiness. We also find evidence that more well connected users write happier
status updates, with a transition occurring around Dunbar's number. More
generally, our work provides evidence of a social sub-network structure within
Twitter and raises several methodological points of interest with regard to
social network reconstructions.Comment: 22 pages, 21 figures, 5 tables, In press at the Journal of
Computational Scienc
Characterizing web pornography consumption from passive measurements
Web pornography represents a large fraction of the Internet traffic, with
thousands of websites and millions of users. Studying web pornography
consumption allows understanding human behaviors and it is crucial for medical
and psychological research. However, given the lack of public data, these works
typically build on surveys, limited by different factors, e.g. unreliable
answers that volunteers may (involuntarily) provide.
In this work, we collect anonymized accesses to pornography websites using
HTTP-level passive traces. Our dataset includes about broadband
subscribers over a period of 3 years. We use it to provide quantitative
information about the interactions of users with pornographic websites,
focusing on time and frequency of use, habits, and trends. We distribute our
anonymized dataset to the community to ease reproducibility and allow further
studies.Comment: Passive and Active Measurements Conference 2019 (PAM 2019). 14 pages,
7 figure
Novel Activity Detection Algorithm to Characterize Spontaneous Stepping During Multimodal Spinal Neuromodulation After Mid-Thoracic Spinal Cord Injury in Rats.
A mid-thoracic spinal cord injury (SCI) severely impairs activation of the lower limb sensorimotor spinal networks, leading to paralysis. Various neuromodulatory techniques including electrical and pharmacological activation of the spinal networks have been successful in restoring locomotor function after SCI. We hypothesized that the combination of self-training in a natural environment with epidural stimulation (ES), quipazine (Quip), and strychnine (Strych) would result in greater activity in a cage environment after paralysis compared to either intervention alone. To assess this, we developed a method measuring and characterizing the chronic EMG recordings from tibialis anterior (TA) and soleus (Sol) muscles while rats were freely moving in their home cages. We then assessed the relationship between the change in recorded activity over time and motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) in animals receiving treatments. We found that the combination of ES, Quip, and Strych (sqES) generated the greatest level of recovery followed by ES + Quip (qES) while ES + Strych (sES) and ES alone showed least improvement in recorded activity. Further, we observed an exponential relationship between late response (LR) component of the MEPs and spontaneously generated step-like activity. Our data demonstrate the feasibility and potential importance of quantitatively monitoring mechanistic factors linked to activity-dependence in response to combinatorial interventions compared to individual therapies after SCI
Approaches for Future Internet architecture design and Quality of Experience (QoE) Control
Researching a Future Internet capable of overcoming the current Internet limitations is a strategic
investment. In this respect, this paper presents some concepts that can contribute to provide some guidelines to
overcome the above-mentioned limitations. In the authors' vision, a key Future Internet target is to allow
applications to transparently, efficiently and flexibly exploit the available network resources with the aim to
match the users' expectations. Such expectations could be expressed in terms of a properly defined Quality of
Experience (QoE). In this respect, this paper provides some approaches for coping with the QoE provision
problem
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