Category Archives: CCR October 2022

Rethinking SIGCOMM’s Conferences: Making Form Follow Function

Scott Shenker

Abstract

In this short essay, I ask whether our current practice of highly selective conferences is helping us achieve SIGCOMM’s research goals.1 This requires first articulating what those goals are, and then evaluating our practices in relation to those goals. To no one’s surprise, this essay contends that there is a significant mismatch between what I believe SIGCOMM’s goals should be and what our current practices achieve. I then propose a radical restructuring of our conferences that would provide better alignment and, as an additional benefit, a stronger sense of community. However, I wrote this essay not to promote the specifics of a particular proposal, but to encourage our community to (i) engage in a thorough reexamination of how we organize SIGCOMM-sponsored conferences and (ii) seriously entertain the possibility of radical changes in our practices.

Download from ACM

Topology and Geometry of the Third-Party Domains Ecosystem: Measurement and Applications

Costas Iordanou, Fragkiskos Papadopoulos

Abstract

Over the years, web content has evolved from simple text and static images hosted on a single server to a complex, interactive and multimedia-rich content hosted on different servers. As a result, a modern website during its loading time fetches content not only from its owner’s domain but also from a range of third-party domains providing additional functionalities and services. Here, we infer the network of the third-party domains by observing the domains’ interactions within users’ browsers from all over the globe. We find that this network possesses structural properties commonly found in complex networks, such as power-law degree distribution, strong clustering, and small-world property. These properties imply that a hyperbolic geometry underlies the ecosystem’s topology. We use statistical inference methods to find the domains’ coordinates in this geometry, which abstract how popular and similar the domains are. The hyperbolic map we obtain is meaningful, revealing the large-scale organization of the ecosystem. Furthermore, we show that it possesses predictive power, providing us the likelihood that third-party domains are co-hosted; belong to the same legal entity; or merge under the same entity in the future in terms of company acquisition. We also find that complementarity instead of similarity is the dominant force driving future domains’ merging. These results provide a new perspective on understanding the ecosystem’s organization and performing related inferences and predictions.

Download from ACM

The October 2022 issue

This October 2022 issue contains two technical papers and one editorial note.

The first technical paper, LGC-ShQ: Datacenter Congestion Control with Queueless Load-based ECN Marking, by Kristjon Ciko and colleagues, provides a thorough performance evaluation of LGC-ShQ, a novel congestion control (CC)mechanism for data-centers. LGC-ShQ’s performance are compared (over Linux) against HULL, the closest solution in the state-of-the-art.

The second technical paper, Topology and Geometry of the Third-Party Domains Ecosystem: Measurement and Applications, by Costas Iordanou and colleagues, studies the network of the third-party domains by observing the domains’ interactions within users’ browsers from all over the globe. The authors then discuss the structural properties of the corresponding network. The results provide a new perspective on understanding the ecosystem’s organization.

We have one editorial note. In Rethinking SIGCOMM’s Conferences: Making Form Follow Function, Scott Shenker asks whether our current practice of highly selective conferences is helping us achieve SIGCOMM’s research goals. This essay contends that there is a significant mismatch between what SIGCOMM’s goals should be and what our current practices achieve, and proposes a radical restructuring of our conferences that would provide better alignment and, as an additional benefit, a stronger sense of community.

I hope that you will enjoy reading this new issue and welcome comments and suggestions on CCR Online (https://ccronline.sigcomm.org) or by email at ccr-editor at sigcomm.org.

LGC-ShQ: Datacenter Congestion Control with Queueless Load-based ECN Marking

Kristjon Ciko, Peyman Teymoori, Michael Welzl

Abstract

We present LGC-ShQ, a new ECN-based congestion control mechanism for datacenters. LGC-ShQ relies on ECN feedback from a Shadow Queue, and it uses ECN not only to decrease the rate, but it also increases the rate in relation to this signal. Real-life tests in a Linux testbed show that LGC-ShQ keeps the real queue at low levels while achieving good link utilization and fairness.

Download from ACM