16804055
SCAN: A Dynamic, Scalable, and Efficient Content Distribution Network
We present SCAN, the Scalable Content Access Network. SCAN combines dynamic replica placement with a self-organizing application-level multicast tree to meet client QoS and server resource constraints. It utilizes an underlying distributed object routing and location system (DOLR) as an essential component.Sim ulation results on both flash-crowd-like synthetic workloads and realWeb server traces show that SCAN deploys close to an optimal number of replicas, achieves good load balance, and incurs a small delay and bandwidth penalty for update multicast relative to static replica placement on IP multicast. We envision that SCAN could enhance a number of different applications, such as content distribution and peer-to-peer file sharing.
10399949
Quantifying Network Denial of Service: A Location Service Case Study
Network Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are increasing in frequency, severity and sophistication, making it desirable to measure the resilience of systems to DoS attacks. In this paper, we propose a simulation-based methodology and apply it to attacks on object location services such as DNS. Our results allow us to contrast the DoS resilience of three distinct architectures for object location.
166109
End-to-End Inference of Router Packet Forwarding Priority
Packet forwarding prioritization (PFP) in routers is one of the mechanisms commonly available to network administrators. PFP can have a significant impact on the performance of applications, the accuracy of measurement tools' results and the effectiveness of network troubleshooting procedures. Despite their potential impact, no information on PFP settings is readily available to end users. In this paper, we present an end-to-end approach for packet forwarding priority inference and its associated tool, POPI. This is the first attempt to infer router packet-forwarding priority through end-to-end measurement. Our POPI tool enables users to discover such network policies through the monitoring and rank classification of loss rates for different packet types. We validated our approach via statistical analysis, simulation, and wide-area experimentation in PlanetLab. As part of our wide-area experiments, we employed POPI to analyze 156 random paths across 162 PlanetLab nodes. We discovered 15 paths flagged with multiple priorities, 13 of which were further validated through hop-by-hop loss rates measurements. In addition, we surveyed all related network operators and received responses for about half of them confirming our inferences.
887532
A Suite of Schemes for User-Level Network Diagnosis without Infrastructure
It is highly desirable and important for end users, with no special privileges, identify and pinpoint faults inside the network that degrade the performance of their applications. However, existing tools are inaccurate to infer the link-level loss rates and have large diagnosis granularity (in terms of the number of hops). To address these problems, we propose a suite of user-level diagnosis approaches in two categories: (1) only need to be deployed at the source and (2) deployed at both source and destination. For the former, we propose two fragmentation aided diagnosis approaches (FAD), Algebraic FAD and Opportunistic FAD, which uses IP fragmentation to enable accurate link-level loss rate inference. For the latter category, we propose Striped Probe Analysis (SPA) which significantly improves the diagnosis granularity over those of the source-only approaches. Internet experiments are applied to evaluate each individual schemes (including an improved version of the state-of-the-art tool, Tulip [1]) and various hybrid approaches. The results indicate that our approaches dramatically outperform existing work (especially for diagnosis granularity) and provide not only the best performance but also smooth tradeoff among deployment requirement, diagnosis accuracy and granularity.
10897641
Reversible sketches for efficient and accurate change detection over network data streams
Traffic anomalies such as failures and attacks are increasing in frequency and severity, and thus identifying them rapidly and accurately is critical for large network operators. The detection typically treats the traffic as a collection of flows and looks for heavy changes in traffic patterns (<i>e.g.</i>, volume, number of connections). However, as link speeds and the number of flows increase, keeping per-flow state is not scalable. The recently proposed sketch-based schemes [14] are among the very few that can detect heavy changes and anomalies over massive data streams at network traffic speeds. However, sketches do not preserve the key (<i>e.g.</i>, source IP address) of the flows. Hence, even if anomalies are detected, it is difficult to infer the culprit flows, making it a big practical hurdle for online deployment. Meanwhile, the number of keys is too large to record.
 To address this challenge, we propose efficient <i>reversible hashing</i> algorithms to infer the keys of culprit flows from sketches without storing any explicit key information. No extra memory or memory accesses are needed for recording the streaming data. Meanwhile, the heavy change detection daemon runs in the background with space complexity and computational time sublinear to the key space size. This short paper describes the conceptual framework of the reversible sketches, as well as some initial approaches for implementation. See [23] for the optimized algorithms in details. comment We further apply various emph IP-mangling algorithms and emph bucket classification methods to reduce the false positives and false negatives. Evaluated with netflow traffic traces of a large edge router, we demonstrate that the reverse hashing can quickly infer the keys of culprit flows even for many changes with high accuracy.
61999607
Towards unbiased end-to-end network diagnosis
Internet fault diagnosis is extremely important for end users, overlay network service providers (like Akamai [1]) and even Internet service providers (ISPs). However, because link-level properties cannot be uniquely determined from end-to-end measurements, the accuracy of existing statistical diagnosis approaches is subject to uncertainty from statistical assumptions about the network. In this paper, we propose a novel Least-biased End-to-end Network Diagnosis (in short, LEND) system for inferring link-level properties like loss rate. We define a minimal identifiable link sequence (MILS) as a link sequence of minimal length whose properties can be uniquely identified from end-to-end measurements. We also design efficient algorithms to find all the MILSes and infer their loss rates for diagnosis. Our LEND system works for any network topology and for both directed and undirected properties, and incrementally adapts to network topology and property changes. It gives highly accurate estimates of the loss rates of MILSes, as indicated by both extensive simulations and Internet experiments. Furthermore, we demonstrate that such diagnosis can be achieved with fine granularity and in near real-time even for reasonably large overlay networks. Finally, LEND can supplement existing statistical inference approaches and provide smooth tradeoff between diagnosis accuracy and granularity.
37744500
Improving Nearest Neighbor Classification with Simulated Gravitational Collapse
The performance of the Nearest Neighbor classifier drops significantly with the increase of the overlapping of the distribution of different classes. To overcome this drawback, we propose to simulate the physical process of gravitational collapse to trim the boundaries of the distribution of each class to reduce overlapping. The proposed simulated gravitational collapse(SGC) algorithm is tested on 7 real-world data sets. Experimental results show that the nearest prototype classifier based on SGC outperforms conventional NN and k-NN classifiers.
45017187
An Agent-Based Metric for Quality of Services over Wireless Networks
In a wireless LAN environment, wireless stations with the strongest received signal can not be guaranteed to have the best quality of service if the population sharing the network capacity was not considered. In other words, within the same access point, the more the population, the less the shared bandwidth, and the worse the quality of service will be. In this paper, we proposed an Anticipative Agent Assistance which is an agent-based metric for evaluating and managing the resource of the wireless access points, computing the potential AP list, and providing clients with resource information of APs. We also propose a novel QoS feedback mechanism which allows users to promptly adjust the service quality with AAA according to the throughput and delay requirements. We evaluate the performance of our proposed method using the ns-2 simulator. Numerical results show that AAA help reduce the transmission delay, increase the throughput, improve the network utilization, accommodate more users, and provide load-balancing.
1752675
Storing and Discovering Critical Workflows from Log in Scientific Exploration
This paper aims at effectively reproducing the results of previous scientific workflow executions. We first identify the information that needs to be recorded in a workflow execution log, based on which we then determine the data flow among experiments. To effectively record a workflow execution log in a relational database management system (RDBMS) when the workflow design is absent, we propose a generic relational storage schema. Then techniques have been designed to automatically discover the minimal set of experiments that must be performed in order to reproduce a scientific result by posing appropriate SQL queries. Although such SQL queries can be evaluated using an off-the-shelf database system, we investigate the unique characteristics of the workflow log data and optimization techniques for evaluating such SQL queries efficiently.
20308502
Object signatures for supporting efficient navigation in object-oriented databases
Most methods that have been proposed to improve query processing in object-oriented databases are designed for the aggregation hierarchy. Although the structure of the generalization hierarchy is similar to the aggregation hierarchy, techniques developed for the aggregation hierarchy cannot fully use the characteristics of the generalization hierarchy to improve performance. We devise a new object signature for the generalization hierarchy. The object signature consists of two parts: a reference signature and a structure signature. The former can be used to eliminate objects that do not match the nested predicates specified in the query, and the latter can be used to eliminate objects that do not belong to the target classes. We propose some processing methods using the object signatures for queries that involve generalization hierarchies. In addition, we define cost models of the object signature and then compare the performance of the traditional query processing method with the object signature method. The results show that using the object signatures can effectively reduce the number of disk accesses in a query.
2308649
Subgoal ordering and granularity control for incremental planning
In this paper, we study strategies in incremental planning for ordering and grouping subproblems partitioned by the subgoals of a planning problem when each sub-problem is solved by a basic planner. To generate a rich set of partial orders for ordering subproblems, we propose a new ordering algorithm based on a relaxed plan built from the initial state to the goal state. The new algorithm considers both the initial and the goal states and can effectively order subgoals in such a way that greatly reduces the number of invalidations during incremental planning. We have also considered trade-offs between the granularity of the subgoal sets and the complexity of solving the overall planning problem. We show an optimal region of grain size that minimizes the total complexity of incremental planning. We propose an efficient strategy to dynamically adjust the grain size in partitioning in order to operate in this optimal region. We further evaluate a redundant-execution scheme that uses two different subgoal orders in order to improve the quality of the plans generated without greatly sacrificing run-time efficiency. Experimental results on using three basic planners (metric-FF, YAHSP, and LPG-TD-speed) show that our strategies are general for improving the time and quality of each of these planners across various benchmarks