Is the Web ready for HTTP/2 Server Push?

HTTP/2 supersedes HTTP/1.1 to tackle the performance challenges of the modern Web. A highly anticipated feature is Server Push, enabling servers to send data without explicit client requests, thus potentially saving time. Although guidelines on how to use Server Push emerged, measurements have shown that it can easily be used in a suboptimal way and hurt instead of improving performance. We thus tackle the question if the current Web can make better use of Server Push. First, we enable real-world websites to be replayed in a testbed to study the effects of different Server Push strategies. Using this, we next revisit proposed guidelines to grasp their performance impact. Finally, based on our results, we propose a novel strategy using an alternative server scheduler that enables to interleave resources. This improves the visual progress for some websites, with minor modifications to the deployment. Still, our results highlight the limits of Server Push: a deep understanding of web engineering is required to make optimal use of it, and not every site will benefit.Comment: More information available at https://push.netray.i

Business Innovation Strategies to Reduce the Revenue Gap for Wireless Broadband Services

Mobile broadband is increasing rapidly both when it comes to traffic and number of subscriptions. The swift growth of the demand will require substantial capacity expansions. Operators are challenged by the fact that revenues from mobile broadband are limited, just a few per cent of APRU, and thus not compensating for declining voice revenues, creating a so called "revenue gap". Concurrently, mobile broadband dominates the traffic, set to grow strongly. In this paper we analyze the potential of different strategies for operators to reduce or bridge the revenue gap. The main options are to reduce network costs, to increase access prices and to exploit new revenue streams. The focus in the paper is on cost & capacity challenges and solutions in the network domain. Operators can cooperate and share sites and spectrum, which could be combined with off-loading heavy traffic to less costly local networks. In the network analysis we illustrate the cost impacts of different levels of demand, re-use of existing base station sites, sharing of base stations and spectrum and deployment of a denser network. A sensitivity analysis illustrates the impact on total revenues if access prices are increased, whether new types of services generate additional revenues, and if it fills the revenue gap. Our conclusion is that the different technical options to reduce the revenue gap can be linked to business strategies that include cooperation with both other operators as well as with non-telecom actors. Hence, innovations in the business domain enable technical solutions to be better or fully exploited.Wireless Internet access, data traffic, revenues, network costs, spectrum, deployment strategies, HSPA, LTE, operator cooperation, value added services, NFC, B2B2C.

A Survey of Green Networking Research

Reduction of unnecessary energy consumption is becoming a major concern in wired networking, because of the potential economical benefits and of its expected environmental impact. These issues, usually referred to as "green networking", relate to embedding energy-awareness in the design, in the devices and in the protocols of networks. In this work, we first formulate a more precise definition of the "green" attribute. We furthermore identify a few paradigms that are the key enablers of energy-aware networking research. We then overview the current state of the art and provide a taxonomy of the relevant work, with a special focus on wired networking. At a high level, we identify four branches of green networking research that stem from different observations on the root causes of energy waste, namely (i) Adaptive Link Rate, (ii) Interface proxying, (iii) Energy-aware infrastructures and (iv) Energy-aware applications. In this work, we do not only explore specific proposals pertaining to each of the above branches, but also offer a perspective for research.Comment: Index Terms: Green Networking; Wired Networks; Adaptive Link Rate; Interface Proxying; Energy-aware Infrastructures; Energy-aware Applications. 18 pages, 6 figures, 2 table

Semantic Compression for Edge-Assisted Systems

A novel semantic approach to data selection and compression is presented for the dynamic adaptation of IoT data processing and transmission within "wireless islands", where a set of sensing devices (sensors) are interconnected through one-hop wireless links to a computational resource via a local access point. The core of the proposed technique is a cooperative framework where local classifiers at the mobile nodes are dynamically crafted and updated based on the current state of the observed system, the global processing objective and the characteristics of the sensors and data streams. The edge processor plays a key role by establishing a link between content and operations within the distributed system. The local classifiers are designed to filter the data streams and provide only the needed information to the global classifier at the edge processor, thus minimizing bandwidth usage. However, the better the accuracy of these local classifiers, the larger the energy necessary to run them at the individual sensors. A formulation of the optimization problem for the dynamic construction of the classifiers under bandwidth and energy constraints is proposed and demonstrated on a synthetic example.Comment: Presented at the Information Theory and Applications Workshop (ITA), February 17, 201