Internet Censorship: An Integrative Review of Technologies Employed to Limit Access to the Internet, Monitor User Actions, and their Effects on Culture

The following conducts an integrative review of the current state of Internet Censorship in China, Iran, and Russia, highlights common circumvention technologies (CTs), and analyzes the effects Internet Censorship has on cultures. The author spends a large majority of the paper delineating China’s Internet infrastructure and prevalent Internet Censorship Technologies/Techniques (ICTs), paying particular attention to how the ICTs function at a technical level. The author further analyzes the state of Internet Censorship in both Iran and Russia from a broader perspective to give a better understanding of Internet Censorship around the globe. The author also highlights specific CTs, explaining how they function at a technical level. Findings indicate that among all three nation-states, state control of Internet Service Providers is the backbone of Internet Censorship. Specifically, within China, it is discovered that the infrastructure functions as an Intranet, thereby creating a closed system. Further, BGP Hijacking, DNS Poisoning, and TCP RST attacks are analyzed to understand their use-case within China. It is found that Iran functions much like a weaker version of China in regards to ICTs, with the state seemingly using the ICT of Bandwidth Throttling rather consistently. Russia’s approach to Internet censorship, in stark contrast to Iran and China, is found to rely mostly on the legislative system and fear to implement censorship, though their technical level of ICT implementation grows daily. TOR, VPNs, and Proxy Servers are all analyzed and found to be robust CTs. Drawing primarily from the examples given throughout the paper, the author highlights the various effects of Internet Censorship on culture – noting that at its core, Internet Censorship destroys democracy

A novel queue-aware wireless link adaptation mechanism and its fixed-point analytical model

A point-to-point (PTP) wireless link is studied that carries long-lived TCP flows and is controlled with active queue management (AQM). A cross-layer queue-aware adaptive modulation and coding (AMC)-based link adaptation (LA) mechanism is proposed for this wireless link to improve the TCP-level throughput relative to the case where AMC decisions are made based solely on the physical layer (PHY) parameters. The proposed simple-to-implement LA mechanism involves the use of an aggressive modulation and coding scheme (MCS) with high spectral efficiency and high block error rates when the queue occupancy exceeds a certain threshold, but otherwise a relatively conservative MCS with lower spectral efficiency and lower block error rates. A fixed-point analytical model is proposed to obtain the aggregate TCP throughput attained at this wireless link and the model is validated by ns-3 simulations. Numerical experimentation with the proposed analytical model applied to an IEEE 802.16-based wireless link demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed queue-aware LA (QAWLA) mechanism in a wide variety of scenarios including cases where the channel information is imperfect. The impact of the choice of the queue occupancy threshold of QAWLA is extensively studied with respect to the choice of AQM parameters in order to provide engineering guidelines for the provisioning of the wireless link. © 2015, Ozturk and Akar

Backscatter from the Data Plane --- Threats to Stability and Security in Information-Centric Networking

Information-centric networking proposals attract much attention in the ongoing search for a future communication paradigm of the Internet. Replacing the host-to-host connectivity by a data-oriented publish/subscribe service eases content distribution and authentication by concept, while eliminating threats from unwanted traffic at an end host as are common in today's Internet. However, current approaches to content routing heavily rely on data-driven protocol events and thereby introduce a strong coupling of the control to the data plane in the underlying routing infrastructure. In this paper, threats to the stability and security of the content distribution system are analyzed in theory and practical experiments. We derive relations between state resources and the performance of routers and demonstrate how this coupling can be misused in practice. We discuss new attack vectors present in its current state of development, as well as possibilities and limitations to mitigate them.Comment: 15 page

A critical look at power law modelling of the Internet

This paper takes a critical look at the usefulness of power law models of the Internet. The twin focuses of the paper are Internet traffic and topology generation. The aim of the paper is twofold. Firstly it summarises the state of the art in power law modelling particularly giving attention to existing open research questions. Secondly it provides insight into the failings of such models and where progress needs to be made for power law research to feed through to actual improvements in network performance.Comment: To appear Computer Communication

On the multiresolution structure of Internet traffic traces

Internet traffic on a network link can be modeled as a stochastic process. After detecting and quantifying the properties of this process, using statistical tools, a series of mathematical models is developed, culminating in one that is able to generate ``traffic'' that exhibits --as a key feature-- the same difference in behavior for different time scales, as observed in real traffic, and is moreover indistinguishable from real traffic by other statistical tests as well. Tools inspired from the models are then used to determine and calibrate the type of activity taking place in each of the time scales. Surprisingly, the above procedure does not require any detailed information originating from either the network dynamics, or the decomposition of the total traffic into its constituent user connections, but rather only the compliance of these connections to very weak conditions.Comment: 57 pages, color figures. Figures are of low quality due to space consideration

End-to-End Simulation of 5G mmWave Networks

Due to its potential for multi-gigabit and low latency wireless links, millimeter wave (mmWave) technology is expected to play a central role in 5th generation cellular systems. While there has been considerable progress in understanding the mmWave physical layer, innovations will be required at all layers of the protocol stack, in both the access and the core network. Discrete-event network simulation is essential for end-to-end, cross-layer research and development. This paper provides a tutorial on a recently developed full-stack mmWave module integrated into the widely used open-source ns--3 simulator. The module includes a number of detailed statistical channel models as well as the ability to incorporate real measurements or ray-tracing data. The Physical (PHY) and Medium Access Control (MAC) layers are modular and highly customizable, making it easy to integrate algorithms or compare Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) numerologies, for example. The module is interfaced with the core network of the ns--3 Long Term Evolution (LTE) module for full-stack simulations of end-to-end connectivity, and advanced architectural features, such as dual-connectivity, are also available. To facilitate the understanding of the module, and verify its correct functioning, we provide several examples that show the performance of the custom mmWave stack as well as custom congestion control algorithms designed specifically for efficient utilization of the mmWave channel.Comment: 25 pages, 16 figures, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials (revised Jan. 2018