Section: Research Program

Experimental approach to Networking

The main consequence of the complexity of the Internet is that modeling and understanding the network and services are harder and harder to achieve. Our team has an experimental approach built around measurements and observation of the current behavior of Internet users and available technology and come up with models for the ways information are exchanged. Then we will design and evaluate protocols and system solutions that allow this seamless, open, efficient, and secure access to information and services. We will in particular focus on whether to follow a clean-slate approach or leverage on existing technologies towards the solutions of the above two challenges. Evaluation of our proposals will be performed by leveraging on networking platforms and simulators developed by the team such as OneLab, FIT and ns-3.

We develop experimental code to evaluate the ideas we propose. As an example, we developed recently the Meddle platform to address the problem of opaqueness and lack of control on the Internet. Meddle uses traffic indirection to diagnose mobile devices independently of the OS, ISP, and access technology. We used the platform to observe personal information leakages by popular iOS and Android applications. We also used it to analyze in detail the network characteristics of video streaming services, the most popular Web-service in the current Internet.