Video Content Distribution | Residential Multihoming | Network Security | Network Economics and Game Theory | PROMISE: Meadia Streaming | DiffServ Networks | Collaborative Information Sharing | Network Services | Music Sharing | Web Traffic
Video Content Distribution
Overview: This project focuses on providing many-to-one video-on-demand over the Internet. Currently, DSL and cable modem are two prevalent broadband technologies for household usage. Both have asymmetric bandwidth property, i.e., the downloading bandwidth is much higher than the uploading bandwidth. Moreover, the broadband connections and the network itself are unreliable. Therefore, providing resilient and carrier grade quality video over network fluctuations is an important issue for this project. To provide continuous, smooth, and high quality video, we require a very robust failure recovery mechanism. We use a combination of mechanisms such as intelligent supplier selection, Forward Error Correction (FEC) code, dynamic rate distribution, dynamic buffer management, and network tomography-based connection monitoring to address unreliability of link as well as the devices and provide high quality streaming.
People:
Ahsan Habib (Siemsn TTB), Stuart
Goose (Siemens TTB)
Publications:
Ahsan Habib and Stuart Goose "CommunityPVR: A Service to Deliver the Long Tail for On-Demand TV,” IEEE Multimedia, 2009 (to appear)
Ahsan Habib and Stuart Goose "On the Feasibility of Peer-to-Peer Video-on-Demand System," (under review)
Ahsan Habib and Stuart Goose "On Modeling the Long-Tail for On-Demand Streaming by CommunityPVR," (under review)
Overview:
Residential multihoming provides path redundancy as well as path diversity that can be used to improve not just network availability, but also application layer quality of service. Through wide-area measurements, we find that less than 30% of hops are overlapped between the paths of a source-destination pair when the source is multihomed. This confirms that multihoming provides more than just first-hop redundancy to the residential user. This path diversity can be effectively utilized by different classes of applications such as streaming, file sharing, etc. The applications can split the connections over available physical paths and even migrate connection from one path to another if a particular path gets congested.This project is a part of 100x100 network design project that has the goal of providing 100 Mbps access to 100 million homes. We plan to analyze the effectiveness of multihoming in the context of 100x100 network.
People:
Ahsan Habib (UC Berkeley), John Chuang (UC Berkeley)Publications:
Ahsan Habib and John Chuang “Improving Application QoS with Residential Multihoming”, Computer Networks, Volume 51, Issue 12, Pages 3323-3337, Aug 2007.
Ahsan Habib, Nicolas Christin, and J. Chuang. "On the Feasibility of Switching ISPs in Residential Multihoming" IWQoS, June 2007.
Ahsan Habib, Nicolas Christin, and John Chuang. "Taking Advantage of Multihoming with Session Layer Striping," In Proceedings of the 9th Global Internet Symposium (Global Internet 2006) . Barcelona, Spain. April 2006.
Ahsan Habib and John Chuang "MMS: A Multihome-aware Media Streaming System," ACM/SPIE Multimedia Computing and Networking (MMCN '06), Jan 2006.
Ahsan Habib, John Chuang "Multihoming Multimedia Streaming", IEEE Workshop on Multimedia Systems and Networking (WMSN '05), April 2005. (Acceptance 30%)
Ahsan Habib, John Chuang "A Measurement-based Analysis of Residential Multihoming," IEEE INFOCOM (Poster paper), March 2005.
Ahsan Habib, John Chuang "On the Effectiveness of Residential Multihoming", Technical Report, School of Information Management and Systems, University of California, Berkeley, TR-SIMS-HC-1104, Oct 2004.
Network Security and Data Integrity
Overview: This research studies and designs techniques for network monitoring and flow control as integral components of the edge routers in a network domain. The enhanced edge routers yield secure network domains, and achieve better performance in terms of high data throughput, low delay, and low loss rates. The potential performance gain from the proposed techniques is critical for the current and emerging network services such as multimedia applications. Using simulation, we evaluate the edge router for data intensive applications such as FTP and delay sensitive applications such as Telnet and Web. We also investigating the data integrity verification in P2P media streaming systems.
People: Ahsan Habib (Purdue University), Mohamed Hefeeda (Purdue University), Maleq Khan (Purdue University), Bharat Bhargava (Purdue University), Dongyan Xu (Purdue University), Mikhail Atallah (Purdue University), John Chuang (University of California, Berkeley),Srinivas R. Avasarala (Andiamo Systems), Venkatesh Prabhakar (Serena Systems)
Publications:
Ahsan Habib, Dongyan Xu, Mikhail Atallah, Bharat Bhargava, John Chuang "Verifying Data Integrity in Peer-to-Peer Media Streaming," ACM/SPIE Multimedia Computing and Networking (MMCN '05), (to appear) Jan., 2005.
Ahsan Habib, Sonia Fahmy, Bharat Bhargava, "Monitoring and Controlling QoS Network Domains," ACM/Wiley International Journal of Network Management, (to appear), Jan-Feb, 2005.
Ahsan Habib, Maleq Khan, Bharat Bhargava, "Edge-to-Edge Measurement-based Distributed Network Monitoring," Computer Networks Journal, Vol. 44, Issue 2, Pages 211-233, Feb 2004
Ahsan Habib, Sonia Fahmy, Srinivas R. Avasarala, Venkatesh Prabhakar, Bharat Bhargava, "On Detecting Service Violations and Bandwidth Theft in QoS Network Domains," Computer Communications, Elsevier, Vol. 26 Issue 8, Pages 861-871, May 20 2003.
Ahsan Habib, Mohamed Hefeeda, Bharat Bhargava, "Detecting Service Violations and DoS Attacks," in Proc. Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS '03), San Diego, CA, Pages 177-189, Feb 2003.
Ahsan Habib, Bharat Bhargava, "Network Tomography-based Unresponsive Flow Control," in Proc. 9th IEEE Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems (FTDCS '03), San Juan, Puerto Rico, May 2003
Ahsan Habib, Bharat Bhargava, "Unresponsive Flow Detection and Control in Differentiated Services Networks ", in Proc. IASTED International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems (PDCS '01), Anaheim CA, Aug 2001.
Network Economics and Game Theory
Overview:
We propose a service differentiated peer selection mechanism for peer-to-peer media streaming systems. The mechanism provides flexibility and choice in peer selection to the contributors of the system, resulting in high quality streaming sessions. Free-riders are given limited options in peer selection, if any, and hence receive low quality streaming. The proposed incentive mechanism follows the characteristics of rank-order tournaments theory that considers only the relative performance of the players, and the top prizes are awarded to the winners of the tournament. Using rank-order tournaments, we analyze the behavior of utility maximizing users. Through simulation and wide-area measurement studies, we verify that the mechanism can provide near optimal streaming quality to the cooperative users until the bottleneck shifts from the sources to the network.
People: Ahsan Habib (UC Berkeley), John Chuang (UC Berkeley)
Publications:
Ahsan Habib, John Chuang "Service Differentiated Peer Selection: An Incentive Mechanism for Peer-to-Peer Media Streaming," (under revision), Feb 2005.
Ahsan Habib, John Chuang "Incentive Mechanism for Peer-to-Peer Media Streaming," International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS) pp. 171-180, June, 2004.
PROMISE: A Peer-to-Peer Streaming System
Overview: We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of PROMISE, a novel peer-to-peer media streaming system encompassing the key functions of peer lookup, peer-based aggregated streaming, and dynamic adaptations to network and peer conditions. Particularly, PROMISE is based on a new application level P2P service called CollectCast. CollectCast performs three main functions: (1) inferring and leveraging the underlying network topology and performance information for the selection of senders; (2) monitoring the status of peers and connections and reacting to peer/connection failure or degradation with low overhead; (3) dynamically switching active senders and standby senders, so that the collective network performance out of the active senders remains satisfactory. Based on both real-world measurement and simulation, we evaluate the performance of PROMISE, and discuss lessons learned from our experience with respect to the practicality and further optimization of PROMISE.
People: Mohamed Hefeeda (Purdue University), Ahsan Habib (Purdue University), Boyan Botev (Purdue University), Dongyan Xu (Purdue University), Bharat Bhargava (Purdue University)
Publications:
M. Hefeeda, A. Habib, B. Botev, D. Xu, D. B. Bhargava, CollectCast: A Peer-to-Peer Service for Media Streaming, ACM Multimedia Systems Journal, (under revision) Sept. 2004.
M. Hefeeda, A. Habib, B. Botev, D. Xu, D. B. Bhargava, PROMISE: Peer-to-Peer Media Streaming Using CollectCast, In Proc. of ACM Multimedia 2003, Berkeley, CA, November 2003.
M. Hefeeda, A. Habib, D. Xu, B. Bhargava, CollectCast: A Tomography-Based Network Service for Peer-to-Peer Streaming, In ACM SIGCOMM'03 Poster Session, Karlsruhe, Germany, August 2003.
Overview:
Traffic Conditioner (TC) is an important part of Differentiated Services (DiffServ) networks. TC marks packets as IN or OUT profile or set the drop precedence. Based on this core routers give services to packets. There are several techniques for conditioning. TCP is a very conservative protocol and we can utilize some of it's features to develop a good TC. TC also should consider the current measured rate and target rate of an aggregated flow to set drop precedence. We explore several ideas to improve the performance of existing TC.People: Ahsan Habib (Purdue University), Sonia Fahmy (Purdue University), Bharat Bhargava (Purdue University)
Publications:
Ahsan Habib, Bharat Bhargava, Sonia Fahmy, "A Round Trip Time and Timeout Aware Traffic Conditioner for Differentiated Services Networks," in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC '02), pp. 981-985, April 2002.
Ahsan Habib, Sonia Fahmy, Bharat Bhargava, "Design and Evaluation of an Adaptive Traffic Conditioner for Differentiated Services Networks ", in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Computer Communication and Networks (IC3N '01), Arizona, pp. 90-95, Oct. 2001.
Collabortive Information Sharing
Overview: Collaborative information sharing is a critical element in the activities of a large number of social, governmental and law-enforcement agencies. It involves the discovery, propagation, and aggregation of information shared by multiple partic- ipants in these activities. Unfortunately, traditional information sharing systems may suffer from problems such as central point of failures/attacks and poor scalability. We propose a framework for de-centralized and collaborative information shar- ing to overcome such problems, while considering multiple aspects of the framework including economics, integrity and trust. Our research requires bringing together expertise in databases, quality of service (QoS), peer-to-peer, economics, and telecommunications. Click here for more.
Overview:
This project investigates how network services can be benefited from early hardware classification and policy enforcement. Worked on the API specification, choice of functionality, design and implementation of the flow enforcer component of this system. The component is a middleware adaptation layer between the high level rule set engine and the hardware-specific adaptation layer.People: Ahsan Habib (Purdue University), Shantashil Palchoudhury (Rice), Aaron Striegel (Iowa State), Christoph Schuba (Sun Microsystems), Michael Speer (Sun Microsystems), Lisa Pavey (Sun Microsystems), Raphael Rom (Technion)
Overview: Explored a new way of broadcasting/sharing music among online communities having similar music preference. The system learns about the listeners and groups them according to their taste. Designed and implemented a web-based system and to demonstrate the proof of concept.
People: Ahsan Habib (Purdue University), Amy Mueller (MIT), Florian Pestoni (IBM Almaden Research Center), Joel Wolf (IBM Watson Research Center)
Publications:
Florian Pestoni, Joel Wolf, Ahsan Habib, Amy Mueller, "KARC: Radio Research", in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Web Delivering of Music (WeDelMusic '01), Florence, Italy, Nov 2001
Overview: Why does it take so long to download a Web page from a Web server? We analyze the download latency for pages for a variety of situations, in which Web browser and server are both within the same country as well as in different countries. Our study examines several sources of latency in accessing Web pages: DNS, TCP, the Web server itself, and the network links and routers. We divide the total download time into four parts: DNS query, connection setup time, time to get the first byte of a Web page, and downloading time. In most cases, roughly half of the time is spent from the moment the browser sends the acknowledgement completing the TCP connection establishment until the first packet containing page content arrives. The bulk of this time is the round trip delay, and only a tiny portion is delay at the server. This implies that the bottleneck in accessing pages over the Internet is due to the Internet itself, and not the server speed (as suggested by another study). The second bottleneck is the 3-way TCP connection establishment (consuming 1/5 to 1/4 of the delay). Conclusions are drawn on how to decrease latency.
People: Ahsan Habib (Virginia Tech), Marc Abrams (Virginia Tech), Ghaleb Abdulla (Virginia Tech), Edward A. Fox (Virginia Tech)
Publications:
Ahsan Habib, Marc Abrams, "Analysis of Sources of Latency in Downloading Web Pages ", in Proc. of WebNet Conference on the WWW and Internet (WebNet '00) San Antonio USA, Nov 2000" Technical Report TR-99-4, Computer Science Dept., Virginia Tech, July 1999
Ahsan Habib, Marc Abrams, "Analysis of Bottlenecks in International Internet Links ", in Proc. International Conference of Computers and Information Technology (ICCITT '00) Dhaka, Bangladesh. Jan 2001.
Ahsan Habib, Ghaleb Abdulla, Edward A. Fox: "Web Traffic Characterization with Time Zones: Seeking outside events that affect the traffic to a distance learning Server" , in Proc. International Symposium on Audio Video Image and Intelligent Applications (ISAVIIA '98), Baden Baden, Germany , August 17-21 1998.
Ahsan Habib, Marc Abrams, "Analysis of Unnecessary Retransmissions in TCP ", Technical Report TR-99-3, Computer Science Dept., Virginia Tech, April 1999