Category Archives: Reviews

Not-a-Bot: Improving Service Availability in the Face of Botnet Attacks

R. Gummadi, H. Balakrishnan, P. Maniatis, S. Ratnasamy, "Not-a-Bot: Improving Service Availability in the Face of Botnet Attacks," NSDI'09, (April 2009). [PDF]

Summary

In recent years, botnets have become the major originators of email spams, DDoS attacks, and click-frauds on advertisement-based web sites. This paper argues that separating human-generated traffic from botnet-generated activities can improve … Continue Reading ››

Scalable Application Layer Multicast

S. Banerjee, B. Bhattacharjee, C. Kommareddy, "Scalable Application Layer Multicast," ACM SIGCOMM Conference, (August 2002). [PDF]

Summary

Deployment of network layer multicast requires support from the underlying infrastructure. Like many other proposals/protocols with similar requirements, it faced the same fate: no one deployed it. This paper presents a scalable application layer multicast protocol, NICE, designed … Continue Reading ››

Scalable Reliable Multicast

S. Floyd, V. Jacobson, S. McCanne, C-G Liu, L. Zhang, "A Reliable Multicast Framework for Light-weight Sessions and Application Level Framing," ACM SIGCOMM Conference, (August 1995). [PDF]

Summary

Unlike unicast transmissions where requirements for different reliable, sequential data delivery are fairly general, different multicast applications have different requirements for reliability. The authors argue that designing … Continue Reading ››

X-Trace: A Pervasive Network Tracing Framework

R. Fonseca, G. Porter, R. H. Katz, S. Shenker, I. Stoica, "X-Trace: A Pervasive Network Tracing Framework," NSDI'07, (April 2007). [PDF]

Summary

Diagnosing problems in modern distributed and networked systems is notoriously hard due to the involvement of multiple administrative domains, application and network protocols, and lack of determinism and reproducibility. X-Trace is a cross-layer, … Continue Reading ››

NetFPGA: A Tool for Network Research and Education

G. Watson, N. McKeown, M. Casado, "NetFPGA: A Tool for Network Research and Education," 2nd Workshop on Architecture Research using FPGA Platforms (WARFP), (February, 2006). [PDF]

Summary

Building custom hardware systems for conducting network experiments as well as for educational purposes is complex and expensive. On the other end of the spectrum, software routers like … Continue Reading ››

A Policy-aware Switching Layer for Data Centers

D. Joseph, A. Tavakoli, I. Stoica, "A Policy-Aware Switching Layer for Data Centers," ACM SIGCOMM Conference, (August 2008). [PDF]

Summary

Middlebox (e.g., firewalls, load balancers etc.) management in existing data center networks is inflexible and require manual configuration by system administrators, which result in frequent misconfigurations. This paper presents a policy-aware switching layer (PLayer) in … Continue Reading ››

Internet Indirection Infrastructure

I. Stoica, D. Adkins, S. Zhuang, S. Shenker, S. Surana, "Internet Indirection Infrastructure," ACM SIGCOMM Conference, (August 2002). [PDF]

Summary

Internet Indirection Infrastructure (i3) is an overlay network that offers a rendezvous-based communication abstraction to decouple the act of sending from the act of receiving in order to support diverse communication services (e.g., multicast, anycast, … Continue Reading ››