Many network middleboxes perform Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), a set of useful tasks which examine packet payloads. These tasks include Intrusion Detection System (IDS), exfiltration detection and parental filtering. However, a long-standing issue is that once packets are sent over HTTPS, middleboxes can no longer accomplish their tasks because the payloads are encrypted. Hence, one ...

In this paper, the authors present BackFi, a novel communication system that enables high throughput, long range communication between very low power backscatter IoT sensors and Wi-Fi APs using ambient Wi-Fi transmissions as the excitation signal. Specifically, they show that it is possible to design IoT sensors and Wi-Fi APs such that the Wi-Fi AP ...

In this paper, the authors present a demonstration of a real-time distributed MIMO system, DMIMO. DMIMO synchronizes transmissions from 4 distributed MIMO transmitters in time, frequency and phase and performs distributed multi-user beamforming to independent clients. DMIMO is built on top of a Zynq hardware platform integrated with an FMCOMMS2 RF front end. The platform ...

In this paper, the authors present the design and implementation of SpotFi, an accurate indoor localization system that can be deployed on commodity Wi-Fi infrastructure. SpotFi only uses information that is already exposed by Wi-Fi chips and does not require any hardware or firmware changes, yet achieves the same accuracy as state-of-the-art localization systems. SpotFi ...

In this paper, the authors challenge the applicability of entropy-based approaches for detecting and diagnosis network traffic anomalies and claim that full statistics (i.e., empirical probability distributions) should be applied to improve the change detection capabilities. They support their claim by detecting and diagnosing large-scale traffic anomalies in a real cellular network, caused by specific ...

One-to-many group communication is common in modern data centers running cloud and web-based applications, or High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. In this paper, the authors propose FlyCast, an architecture using the physical layer of Free-Space Optics (FSO) to accelerate multicast communication. FlyCast leverages off-the-shelf devices (e.g. switchable mirror and beam splitter) to physically split the ...

Legacy congestion controls including TCP and its variants are known to perform poorly over cellular networks due to highly variable capacities over short time scales, self-inflicted packet delays and packet losses unrelated to congestion. To cope with these challenges, the authors present Verus, an end-to-end congestion control protocol that uses delay measurements to react quickly ...

Datacenter applications like cloud storage need high bandwidth (40Gbps or more) to meet rising customer demand. Traditional TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) stacks cannot be used at such speeds, since they have very high CPU (Central Processing Unit) overhead. The brutal economics of cloud services business dictates that CPU usage that cannot be monetized should ...

Android app is an important class of today’s Internet applications that generate roughly 40-50% of mobile Web and app traffic. More than 1.4 million Android apps are offered through Google’s open market and tens of thousands of new apps are added every month. However, very little information is known about their application protocol behaviors because ...

A common pattern in the architectures of modern interactive web-services is that of large request fan-outs, where even a single end-user request (task) arriving at an application server triggers tens to thousands of data accesses (sub-tasks) to different stateful backend servers. The overall response time of each task is bottlenecked by the completion time of ...