Live-blogging HotNets 2012

Note: This blogging might be rather bursty. If you want something more deterministic, here's the HotNets program.

This is Day One. Day Two is here.

Session 1: Architecture and Future Directions

Teemu Koponen spoke about how combining the ideas of edge-core separation (from MPLS), separating control logic from the data plane (from SDN), and general-purpose computation on packets (from software routers) can lead to a more evolvable software defined Internet architecture. [Barath Raghavan, Teemu Koponen, Ali Ghodsi, Martin Casado, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Scott Shenker: Software-Defined Internet Architecture]

Sandeep Gupta discussed rather scary hardware trends, including increasing error rates in memory, and how this may affect networks (potentially increasing loss rates). [Bin Liu, Hsunwei Hsiung, Da Cheng, Ramesh Govindan, Sandeep Gupta: Towards Systematic Roadmaps for Networked Systems]

Raymond Cheng talked about how upcoming capabilities which will be widely deployed in web browsers will enable P2P applications among browsers, so free services can really be free. Imagine databases in browsers, or every browser acting as an onion router. [Raymond Cheng, Will Scott, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Tom Anderson: FreeDOM: a new Baseline for the Web]

Session 2: Security and Privacy

Scott Shenker examined how to build inter-domain routing with secure multi-party computation (SMPC), to preserve privacy of policies. The idea is that interdomain routing really is a multi-party computation of global routes, and participants want it to be secure. The benefits of using SMPC: autonomy, privacy, simple convergence behavior, and a policy model not tied to computational model. The last item should be emphasized: there's a lot more potential policy flexibility here with a much easier deployment story, just changing software at the set of servers running the computation. For example do other classes of policies have different or better oscillation policies? Part of this (convergence) seems to connect with Consensus Routing. Jeff Mogul mentioned an interesting point: By adding the layer of privacy it may be very hard to figure out what's going on inside the algorithm and debug why it arrived at a particular result. [Debayan Gupta, Aaron Segal, Gil Segev, Aurojit Panda, Michael Schapira, Joan Feigenbaum, Jennifer Rexford, Scott Shenker: A New Approach to Interdomain Routing Based on Secure Multi-Party Computation]

Katerina Argyraki spoke about how we can change the basic assumption of secure communication: creating a shared secret not based on computational difficulty, but on physical location. The idea is to use different wireless interference across location. Security is more robust that you might think, in that you just need a lower bound on how much information Eve misses, rather than which pieces of message Eve missed. An implementation generated 38 secret Kbps between 8 nodes. However in a few corner cases Eve learned a substantial amount about the secret. There is some hope to improve this.[Iris Safaka, Christina Fragouli, Katerina Argyraki, Suhas Diggavi: Creating Shared Secrets out of Thin Air]

Saikat Guha linked the problem of data breaches to money and proposed data breach insurance ("Obamacare for data") In a survey, 77% of users said they would pay, a median of $20. (Saikat thought this may be optimistic.) They're working to develop a browser-based app to monitor user behavior, offer individuals incentives to change to more secure behavior, and see if people actually change. [Saikat Guha, Srikanth Kandula: Act for Affordable Data Care.]

Lunch!

Session 3: Software-Defined Networking

Aaron Gember spoke about designing an architecture for software defined middleboxes, taking the idea of SDN to more complex processing. Distributed state management is one challenge. [Aaron Gember, Prathmesh Prabhu, Zainab Ghadiyali, Aditya Akella: Toward Software-Defined Middlebox Networking]

Monia Ghobadi has rethought end-to-end congestion control in software-defined networks. The work observes that TCP has numerous parameters that operators might want to tune — initial congestion window size, TCP variant, even AIMD parameters, and more — that can have a dramatic effect on performance. But the effects they have depend on current network conditions. The idea of the system they're building, OpenTCP, is to provide an automatic and dynamic network-wide tuning of these parameters to achieve performance goals of the network. This is done in an SDN framework with a central controller that gathers information about the network and makes an educated decision about how end-hosts should react. Experiments show some very nice improvements in flow completion time. Questions: Did you see cases when switching dynamically offered an improvement? And in general, how often do you need to switch to get near the best performance? Some of that remains to be characterized in experiments. [Monia Ghobadi, Soheil Hassas Yeganeh, Yashar Ganjali: Rethinking End-to-End Congestion Control in Software-Defined Networks]

Eric Keller, now at the University of Colorado, spoke about network migration: Moving your virtual enterprise network between cloud providers, or moving within a provider to be able to save power on underutilized servers, for example. Now, doing this while keeping the live network running reliably is not trivial. The solution here involves cloning the network and using tunnels from old to new, and then migrating VMs. But then, you need to update switch state in a consistent way to ensure reliable packet delivery. Some questions: How do you deal with SLAs, how do you deal with networks that span multiple controllers? [Eric Keller, Soudeh Ghorbani, Matthew Caesar, Jennifer Rexford: Live Migration of an Entire Network (and its Hosts)]

Session 4: Performance

Ashish Vulimiri presented our paper on making the Internet faster. The problem: Getting consistent low latency is extremely hard, because it requires eliminating all exceptional conditions. On the other hand, we know how to scale up throughput capacity. We can convert some extra capacity into a way to achieve consistent low latency: execute latency-sensitive operations twice, and use the first answer that finishes. The argument, through a cost-benefit analysis and several experiments, is that this redundancy technique should be used much more pervasively than it is today. For example, speeding up DNS queries by more than 2x is easy. [Ashish Vulimiri, Oliver Michel, P. Brighten Godfrey, Scott Shenker: More is Less: Reducing Latency via Redundancy]

The questions are getting interesting. Where is Martha Raddatz?

Udi Weinsberg went in the other direction: redundancy elimination. This is an interesting scenario where a kind of content-centric networking may be a big help: in a disaster which cuts off high-throughput communication, a DTN can provide a way for emergency response personnel to learn what response is most effective, through delivery of photos taken by people in the disaster area. But in this scenario, as they have verified using real-world data sets, people tend to take many redundant photos. Since the throughput of the network is limited, smart content-aware redundancy elimination can more quickly get the most informative photos into the hands of emergency personnel. [Udi Weinsberg, Qingxi Li, Nina Taft, Athula Balachandran, Gianluca Iannaccone, Vyas Sekar, Srinivasan Seshan: CARE: Content Aware Redundancy Elimination for Disaster Communications on Damaged Networks

Onward to Day Two...