Practical and Efficient Construction of Network Caricatures

Khaled Harfoush
North Carolina State University

Abstract:

The deployment of distributed network-aware applications over the Internet
requires an accurate representation of the conditions of underlying
network resources. To be practical, this representation must be possible
at multiple granularities relative to a metric of interest.

In the first part of this talk, I will overview MINT, a framework for the
efficient construction of such representations using only end-to-end
measurements. I will describe a number of instantiations of MINT for
various metrics, including packet loss rate, delay, hop-count, and
bandwidth. For each such metric, MINT constructions require the
availability of a procedure for the measurement of the value of the metric
on the shared portion of the paths between a single source and two
destinations. In the second part of this talk, I will focus on the
development of such a procedure for the bottleneck bandwidth metric. Using
novel "Cartouche Probing" primitives, I will show how to efficiently
measure the bottleneck bandwidth along any segment of a path between two
end-points, and how to use such measurements to characterize the
bottleneck bandwidth of segments between a set of end hosts. Throughout my
talk, I will present experimental results based on simulations and
Internet validations, showing the effectiveness of our proposed techniques
for building network caricatures.

This work was conducted in collaboration with Azer Bestavros and John Byers


Short Bio:

Khaled Harfoush (PhD'02, Boston U) is Assistant Professor in the
Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, which
he joined in 2002. Prof. Harfoush is a recipient of the prestigious NSF
CAREER award and his research interests are in the general areas of
network modeling, Internet Measurement, Peer-to-Peer systems and network
security.

Prof. Harfoush research aims at an end-to-end characterization of network
dynamics through the construction of compact, efficient network models.
His research also aims at adapting the control strategies of transport
protocols and network applications at massively accessed Internet servers
in order to more efficiently utilize shared network resources and optimize
content delivery. Prof. Harfoush research on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems is
primarily focused on the design and implementation of network protocols
supporting new services that complement the traditional mostly
file-sharing applications, new schemes to locate services, new strategies
to serve them that compensate for the discrepancies in capacities and
intentions of different peers in the system. Prof. Harfoush research in
Security targets efficient key distribution protocols in ad-hoc networks.
Prof. Harfoush research is backed by more than half-a-dozen Ph.D. and M.S.
students.

Prof. Harfoush has taught many computer science courses. His signature
course is CSC773 Advanced Topics in Internet technology, a graduate course
offered once a year, which he developed in 2003 as a gateway to advanced
networking research at North Carolina State University. Prof. Harfoush is
a member of the ACM and IEEE. He has served as PC member for numerous
symposia--including INFOCOM, ICNP, ICC, ICCCN, IWNDA, and PAM.