Tag Archives: editorial

Evaluating the artifacts of SIGCOMM papers

Damien Saucez, Luigi Iannone, Olivier Bonaventure

Abstract

A growing fraction of the papers published by CCR and at SIGCOMM- sponsored conferences include artifacts such as software or datasets. Besides CCR, these artifacts were rarely evaluated. During the last months of 2018, we organised two different Artifacts Evaluation Committees to which authors could submit the artifacts of their papers for evaluation. The first one evaluated the papers accepted by Conext’18 shortly after the TPC decision. It assigned ACM reproducibility badges to 12 different papers. The second one evaluated papers accepted by CCR and any SIGCOMM-sponsored conference. 28 papers received ACM reproducibility badges. We report on the results of a short survey among artifacts authors and reviewers and provide some suggestions for future artifacts evaluations.

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The January 2019 Issue

2019 is a special year for SIGCOMM as your SIG will celebrate its 50th birthday at SIGCOMM’19 in August. During the last half century, the networking field has evolved a lot and SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (CCR) contributed to this evolution by timely disseminating technical papers. CCR will celebrate SIGCOMM’s birthday with a special issue that will contain editorial notes that reflect on both the past and the future of your SIG. This special issue will be published in October 2019. Its detailed content is still being worked on, but we expect that you will find lots of interesting information in this issue. If you plan to submit papers to CCR, please note that the October 2019 issue will not publish any new technical paper. All the papers submitted between March 1st, 2019 and September 1st, 2019 will be considered for the January 2020 issue.

This January 2019 issue contains one technical paper and four editorial notes. In “Parametrized Complexity of Virtual Network Embeddings: Dynamic & Linear Programming Approximations”, Matthias Rost et al. analyse the problem of mapping a virtual network on a physical one. They propose both theoretical experimental results.

The first two editorial notes are position papers addressing different technical topics. In “Network Telemetry: Towards A Top-Down Approach”, Minlan Yu argues that we should view network telemetry from a different angle. Instead of using a bottom-up approach that relies on passively collecting data from various devices and then inferring the target network-wide information, she suggests a top-down approach and envisions the possibility of providing high- level declarative abstractions that would en- able operators to define specific measurement queries. This editorial note could be of interest for many Internet measurement researchers.

In “Thoughts on Load Distribution and the Role of Programmable Switches”, James McCauley and his colleagues take a step back at some usages of programmable network switches. More precisely, they wonder which type of functionality should be migrated to switches and which functionality should not. This is a very interesting question that should be answered when writing the motivation for many papers on programmable switches.

The two other editorial notes were prepared at a recent Dagstuhl seminar that focused on the reproducibility of network research. In “The Dagstuhl Beginners Guide to Reproducibility for Experimental Networking Research”, Vaibhav Bajpai and his eight co-authors have assembled a very interesting and very useful guide filled with hints and recommendations for young researchers who begin to experiment with networks. This article will probably soon become a must read in many graduate schools. During the same seminar, another group of researchers lead by Alberto Dainotti brainstormed about our x pages two column papers. This format was interesting when articles were disseminated on real paper. Today, thirty years after the invention of the web, there are many other possibilities to disseminate scientific information. Many of these techniques are more collaborative and open than putting pdf files on web servers. “Open Collaborative Hyperpapers: A Call to Action” encourages the measurements community to collaborate on the preparation of hyperpapers. This editorial note explains the motivations for these hyperpapers and discusses some solv- able technical challenges. An interesting point about this approach is that it could encourage both a faster dissemination of research results and a truly open model that encourages authors to collaborate. While brainstorming about the 50th birthday issue of SIGCOMM, we had an interesting teleconference with Vint Cerf who reminded us of the role that SIGCOMM Computer Communication played in allowing a fast dissemination of recent research results. He compared CCR with publications such as the Journal of the ACM that had much longer publication delays.

The hyperpapers in the last editorial note of this issue could be a modern way of disseminating important research results. I would love to see researchers collaborating on hyperpapers in the coming months and submitting their work to CCR. Such a submission would violate the CCR submission guidelines that still assume that authors pro- vide pdf files. If such an hyperpaper gets sub- mitted to CCR, we find a suitable reviewing process within the CCR Editorial board.

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.

Olivier Bonaventure

CCR Editor

Network Telemetry: Towards A Top-Down Approach

Minlan Yu

Abstract

Network telemetry is about understanding what is happening in the current network. It serves as the basis for making a variety of management decisions for improving the performance, availability, security, and efficiency of networks. However, it is challenging to build real-time and fine-grained network telemetry systems because of the need to support a variety of measurement queries, handle a large amount of traffic for large networks, while staying within the resource constraints at hosts and switches. Today, most operators take a bottom-up approach by passively collecting data from individual devices and infer the network-wide information they need. They are often limited by the monitoring tools device vendors provide and find it hard to extract useful information. In this paper, we argue for a top-down approach: We should provide a high-level declarative abstraction for operators to specify measurement queries, programmable measurement primitives at switches and hosts, and a runtime that translates the high-level queries into low-level API calls. We discuss a few recent works taking this top-down approach and call for more research in this direction.

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Thoughts on Load Distribution and the Role of Programmable Switches

James McCauley, Aurojit Panda, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Scott Shenker

Abstract

The trend towards powerfully programmable network switching hardware has led to much discussion of the exciting new ways in which it can be used. In this paper, we take a step back, and examine how it should be used.

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The Dagstuhl Beginners Guide to Reproducibility for Experimental Networking Research

Vaibhav Bajpai, Anna Brunstrom, Anja Feldmann, Wolfgang Kellerer , Aiko Pras, Henning Schulzrinne, Georgios Smaragdakis, Matthias Wählisch , Klaus Wehrle

Abstract

Reproducibility is one of the key characteristics of good science, but hard to achieve for experimental disciplines like Internet measurements and network systems. This guide provides advice to researchers, particularly those new to the field, on designing experiments so that their work is more likely to be reproducible and to serve as a foundation for follow-on work by others.

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Open Collaborative Hyperpapers: A Call to Action

Alberto Dainotti, Ralph Holz, Mirja Kühlewind, Andra Lutu, Joel Sommers, Brian Trammell

Abstract

Drawing on discussions at various venues, we envision a publishing ecosystem for Internet science, supporting publications that are self-contained, interactive, multi-level, open, and collaborative. These publications, which we dub hyperpapers, not only address issues with reproducibility and verifiability of research in Internet science and measurement, but have the potential to increase the impact of our work and change how collaborations work in the field. This note announces initial experiments with Internet measurement hyperpapers with the help of common, tested technologies in data science and software development, and is a call to action to others to come build out this vision with us.

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The October 2018 issue

SIGCOMM’18 was held in Hungary and the participants were pleased with both the technical program and the social interactions with all the members of the community. During her keynote on Networks Capable of Change, Jennifer Rexford mentioned two papers published in CCR that have had an important impact on our community : OpenFlow: enabling innovation in campus networks and P4: programming protocol- independent packet processors. These two editorial notes paved the way for Software-Defined Networks and then programmable switches. They are a good illustration of the benefits of having a venue like CCR that is open to other types of papers than the scientific papers that usually appear in our conferences and workshops.

This issue contains three regular papers, two editorial notes and the best papers of five recent SIGCOMM’18 workshops. Our first paper, On Max-min Fair Allocation for Multi-source Transmission, co-authored by G. Li et al., proposes and evaluates an algorithm to provide max-min fairness in a network where the same information can be downloaded from multiple sources. In On Collaborative Predictive Blacklisting, Luca Malis and his colleagues study collaborative predictive blacklisting (CPB) wherein differ- ent organizations share information about attacks in real time and use it to update their blacklists. Finally, in Bootstrapping Privacy Services in Today’s Internet, T. Lee et al. propose and analyse different services that could be provided by Internet Service Providers to provide better privacy to their users.

The two editorial notes published in this issue are very different. In Toward Demand- Aware Networking: A Theory for Self- Adjusting Network, C. Avin and S. Schmid propose to initiate the study of the theory of demand-aware, self-adjusting networks. In The 10th Workshop on Active Internet Measurements (AIMS-10) Report, kc Claffy and David Clark report the lessons learned from a recent workshop.

This issue also contains the best pa- pers selected by the organizers of five SIGCOMM’18 workshops:

• Learning IP Network Representations presented by M. Li et al. at BIG- DAMA’18

• Measuring the Impact of a Success- ful DDoS Attack on the Customer Behaviour of Managed DNS Service Providers presented by A. Abhista et al. at the workshop on traffic measure- ments for Cybersecurity

• Making Content Caching Policies ’Smart’ using the DeepCache Framework presented by A. Narayanan et al. at NetAI’18

• Refining Network Intents for Self- Driving Networks presented by A. Jacobs et al. at SelfDN’18

• A Formally Verified NAT Stack presented by S. Pirelli et al. at KBNets’18

The composition of the Editorial Board has also been modified recently. After several years of active participation, Costin Raiciu, Fahad Dogar, Alberto Dainotti and David Choffnes have concluded their term. I would like to thank them on behalf of the authors of all the papers that they handled during the last years. Sergey Gorinsky (IMDEA Networks, Spain) has agreed to join the Editorial board.

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.

Olivier Bonaventure

CCR Editor

Toward Demand-Aware Networking: A Theory for Self-Adjusting Networks

Chen Avin, Stefan Schmid

Abstract

The physical topology is emerging as the next frontier in an ongoing effort to render communication networks more flexible. While first empirical results indicate that these flexibilities can be exploited to reconfigure and optimize the network toward the workload it serves and, e.g., providing the same bandwidth at lower infrastructure cost, only little is known today about the fundamental algorithmic problems underlying the design of reconfigurable networks. This paper initiates the study of the theory of demand-aware, self-adjusting networks. Our main position is that self-adjusting networks should be seen through the lense of self-adjusting datastructures. Accordingly, we present a taxonomy classifying the different algorithmic models of demand-oblivious, fixed demand-aware, and reconfigurable demand-aware networks, introduce a formal model, and identify objectives and evaluation metrics.We also demonstrate, by examples, the inherent advantage of demand-aware networks over state-of-the-art demand-oblivious, fixed networks (such as expanders). We conclude by observing that the usefulness of self-adjusting networks depends on the spatial and temporal locality of the demand; as relevant data is scarce, we call for community action.

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The 10th Workshop on Active Internet Measurements (AIMS-10) Report

kc Claffy, David Clark

Abstract

On 13-15 March 2018, CAIDA hosted its tenth Workshop on Active Internet Measurements (AIMS-10). This workshop series provides a forum for stakeholders in Internet active measurement projects to communicate their interests and concerns, and explore cooperative approaches to maximizing the collective benefit of deployed infrastructure and gathered data. An overarching theme this year was how to inform new legislation of communications policy in the U.S. Given the continued limited insight into Internet operations by researchers and policymakers, we tried to focus these discussions on what data is or could be measured to shape and support current and emerging policy debates. Materials related to the workshop are at http://www.caida.org/workshops/aims/1803/.

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The July 2018 issue

In May, the CCR Editorial board selects the two best papers that were published in the four previous issues (i.e. July 2017, October 2017, January 2018 and April 2018). For 2018, two measurement papers were chosen:

These two papers will be presented during the CCR session at SIGCOMM’18. Both papers have proposed a methodology, collected measurements and released artifacts to allow other researchers to reproduce and extend the paper results. CCR continues to encourage papers to release their artifacts by allowing them to be longer than six pages. SIGCOMM will do one further step to encourage the release of paper artifacts by the creation of an Artifacts Evaluation Committe that will organise the evaluation of the artifacts associated with papers accepted in CCR and the SIGCOMM sponsored conferences in 2018. The final details are still being discussed. They will be announced during SIGCOMM’18 and posted on https://www.sigcomm.org.

This issue starts with three technical articles. In Accelerating Network Measurement in Software, Y. Zhou, O. Alipourfard, M. Yu and T. Yang propose a new technique that leverages caching to improve network measurement software. They release the software
developed for the paper at https://github.com/zhouyangpkuer/Agg-Evict.

Our second technical paper looks at the BGP peerings and more precisely those maintained by the so called Hypergiants, i.e. the larget content providers and CDNs. T. Bottger, F. Cuadrado and S. Uhlig analyse in Looking for Hypergiants in PeeringDB the interconnections of those networks from IXP data. The authors also release the code and the dataset used to write their paper.

The third technical paper of this issue fo- cuses on the Domain Name System. R. AlDalky, M. Rabinovich and M. Allman propose and evaluate in Practical Challenge-Response for DNS a new technique that relies on challenge-responses to validate the authenticity of DNS requests.

In addition to the technical papers, this issue also contains three editorial notes. In Mosaic5G: Agile and Flexible Service Platforms for 5G Research, N. Nikaein, C. Chang and K. Alexandris describe Mosaic5G, an open-source software platform that can be used to create 5G networks. Given the buzz around 5G networks, I expect that many researchers will be interested by this platform. In NDN Host Model, H. Zhang, Y. Li, Z. Zhang, A. Afanasyev and L. Zhang discuss how the traditionnal host model must be reconsidered with Named Data Networking (NDN). Finally, KC Claffy, G. Huston and D. Clark summarise in Workshop on Internet Economics (WIE2017) Final Report the conclusions of a recent workshop that they organised.

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

Olivier Bonaventure

CCR Editor