Congratulations to Srikanth Sundaresan, whose paper “Measuring and Mitigating Web Performance Bottlenecks in Broadband Access Networks“, was selected for the Community Contribution Award at ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference.  The research uses the BISmark home network measurement platform which he and others have developed and deployed in more than 200 home networks around the world.

The major findings of the work include:

• When the downstream throughput of the access link exceeds about 16 Mbits/s, latency is the main bottleneck for Web page load time.
• Placing a cache in the home network and performing active prefetching for DNS records and TCP connections can improve Web page load time by as much as 35%.

The paper was selected for the award based on the importance of the research findings and the value of the software and data to the broader networking community.  Congratulations to Srikanth!

Prof. Nick Feamster delivered a lecture on measuring and circumventing Internet censorship at the ETH Zurich Workshop on Securing Future Communication Networks Against Emerging Threats.  His talk covered three topics:

• Challenges in measuring Internet censorship, including ongoing efforts to develop a comprehensive tool for measuring the extent and evolution of Internet censorship.
• Systems that perform deniable circumvention of censorship, including Collage and Infranet, and how they (and other systems) can be used to implement channels such as Tor pluggable transports.
• The emergence of “soft censorship” and overt information control as an alternative to outright censorship, including the use of personalization and social media as vectors for information manipulation.

The slides from the talk are available here.

Arpit Gupta spoke about a Software-Defined Internet Exchange at NANOG 59 in Phoenix, Arizona.  An abstract for the talk is below. See Arpit’s talk slides here.

Abstract: Deploying software-defined networking (SDN) at Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) offers new hope for solving longstanding problems in interdomain routing. SDN allows direct expression of more flexible policies, and IXPs are central rendezvous points that are in the midst of a rebirth, making them a natural place to start. We present the design of an SDN exchange point (SDX) that enables much more expressive policies than conventional hop-by-hop, destination-based forwarding. ISPs can apply many diverse actions on packets based on multiple header fields, and distant networks can exercise “remote control” over packet handling. This flexibility enables applications such as inbound traffic engineering, redirection of traffic to middleboxes, wide-area server load balancing, and blocking of unwanted traffic. Supporting these applications requires effective ways to combine the policies of multiple ISPs. Our SDX controller provides each ISP the abstraction of its own virtual switch and sequentially composes the policies of different ISPs into a single set of rules in the physical switches. Preliminary experiments on our operational SDX demonstrate the potential for changing interdomain routing from the inside out.