A Privacy-Preserving Protocol for Network-Neutral Caching in ISP Networks

By performing in-network caching, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) allow Content Providers (CPs) to serve contents from locations closer to users. In this way, the pressure of content delivery on ISPs’ network is alleviated, and the users’ Quality-of-Experience (QoE) improved. Due to its impact on QoE, caching has been recently considered as a form of traffic prioritization in the debate on Network Neutrality (NN). A possible approach to perform NN-compliant caching consists in assigning the same portion of cache storage to all the CPs. However, this static subdivision does not consider the different popularities of the CPs’ contents and is therefore inefficient. Alternatively, the cache can be subdivided among the CPs proportionally to the popularity of their contents. However, CPs consider this information private and are reluctant to disclose it. In this work, we propose a protocol to perform a popularity-driven subdivision of the caches’ storage in a privacy-preserving and network-neutral fashion. The protocol is based on the Shamir Secret Sharing (SSS) scheme and is designed to ensure a NN-compliant subdivision of the caches while preserving the privacy of both CPs and ISP (i.e., contents’ popularity and caches’ size are not disclosed). Through dynamic simulation, we show that the popularity-driven cache subdivision (enforced by using our protocol) outperforms several baseline approaches in terms of overall network Resource Occupation (RO) and caching Hit-Ratios. Thanks to our numerical results, we observe that the frequency of execution of the protocol has a significant impact on the RO, and that the ISP can tune this frequency to minimize its RO while introducing an acceptable data overhead. Because of this tuning, several CPs may experience a loss with respect to the hit-ratio that they would obtain by independently choosing the frequency of execution. This loss is very limited, and the employment of the protocol is therefore beneficial to all the involved parties, especially since, by using it, CPs are guaranteed that the ISP behaves in a network-neutral manner

Stochastic Dynamic Cache Partitioning for Encrypted Content Delivery

In-network caching is an appealing solution to cope with the increasing bandwidth demand of video, audio and data transfer over the Internet. Nonetheless, an increasing share of content delivery services adopt encryption through HTTPS, which is not compatible with traditional ISP-managed approaches like transparent and proxy caching. This raises the need for solutions involving both Internet Service Providers (ISP) and Content Providers (CP): by design, the solution should preserve business-critical CP information (e.g., content popularity, user preferences) on the one hand, while allowing for a deeper integration of caches in the ISP architecture (e.g., in 5G femto-cells) on the other hand. In this paper we address this issue by considering a content-oblivious ISP-operated cache. The ISP allocates the cache storage to various content providers so as to maximize the bandwidth savings provided by the cache: the main novelty lies in the fact that, to protect business-critical information, ISPs only need to measure the aggregated miss rates of the individual CPs and do not need to be aware of the objects that are requested, as in classic caching. We propose a cache allocation algorithm based on a perturbed stochastic subgradient method, and prove that the algorithm converges close to the allocation that maximizes the overall cache hit rate. We use extensive simulations to validate the algorithm and to assess its convergence rate under stationary and non-stationary content popularity. Our results (i) testify the feasibility of content-oblivious caches and (ii) show that the proposed algorithm can achieve within 10\% from the global optimum in our evaluation

To be neutral or not neutral? the in-network caching dilemma

Caching allows Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to reduce network traffic and Content Providers (CPs) to increase the offered QoS. However, when contents are encrypted, effective caching is possible only if ISPs and CPs cooperate. We suggest possible forms of non-discriminatory cooperation that make caching compliant with the principles of Net-Neutrality (NN

The Exploitation of Web Navigation Data: Ethical Issues and Alternative Scenarios

Nowadays, the users' browsing activity on the Internet is not completely private due to many entities that collect and use such data, either for legitimate or illegal goals. The implications are serious, from a person who exposes unconsciously his private information to an unknown third party entity, to a company that is unable to control its information to the outside world. As a result, users have lost control over their private data in the Internet. In this paper, we present the entities involved in users' data collection and usage. Then, we highlight what are the ethical issues that arise for users, companies, scientists and governments. Finally, we present some alternative scenarios and suggestions for the entities to address such ethical issues.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figur

CLOSER: A Collaborative Locality-aware Overlay SERvice

Current Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing systems make use of a considerable percentage of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) bandwidth. This paper presents the Collaborative Locality-aware Overlay SERvice (CLOSER), an architecture that aims at lessening the usage of expensive international links by exploiting traffic locality (i.e., a resource is downloaded from the inside of the ISP whenever possible). The paper proves the effectiveness of CLOSER by analysis and simulation, also comparing this architecture with existing solutions for traffic locality in P2P systems. While savings on international links can be attractive for ISPs, it is necessary to offer some features that can be of interest for users to favor a wide adoption of the application. For this reason, CLOSER also introduces a privacy module that may arouse the users' interest and encourage them to switch to the new architectur