With object storage systems being increasingly recognized as a preferred way to expose one’s storage infrastructure to the web, the past few years have witnessed an explosion in the acceptance of these systems. Unfortunately, the proliferation of available solutions and the complexity of each individual one, coupled with a lack of dedicated workload, make it ...

Commercial analytical database systems suffer from a high “Time-to-first-analysis”: before data can be processed, it must be modeled and schematized, transferred into the database’s storage layer, and optionally clustered and indexed. For many types of structured data, this upfront effort is unjustifiable, so the data are processed directly over the file system using the Hadoop ...

In LTE systems, the downlink scheduler is an essential component for efficient radio resource utilization; hence, in the context of LTE simulation, the availability of good down-link scheduler models is very important. At the time this work started, the LTE module of the ns-3 simulator only supported two types of scheduler, namely Round Robin and ...

The growing popularity of virtual machines is pushing the demand for high performance communication between them. Past solutions have seen the use of hardware assistance, in the form of “PCI pass-through” (dedicating parts of physical NICs to each virtual machine) and even bouncing traffic through physical switches to handle data forwarding and replication. In this ...

Clouds commonly store Virtual Machine (VM) images on networked storage. This poses a serious potential scalability bottleneck as launching a single fresh VM instance requires, at minimum, several hundred MB of network reads. As this bottleneck occurs most severely during read-intensive launching of new VMs, the authors focus on scalably minimizing time to boot a ...

WiFi-based Wireless LANs (WLANs) are widely used for Internet access. They were designed such that an Access Points (AP) serves few associated clients with symmetric uplink/downlink traffic patterns. Usage of WiFi hotspots in locations such as airports and large conventions frequently experience poor performance in terms of downlink goodput and responsiveness. The authors study the ...

Every night, a large number of idle Smartphones are plugged into a power source for recharging the battery. Given the increasing computing capabilities of Smartphones, these idle phones constitute a sizeable computing infrastructure. Therefore, for an enterprise which supplies its employees with Smartphones, the authors argue that a computing infrastructure that leverages idle Smartphones being ...

Two emerging trends of Internet applications, video traffic becoming dominant and usage-based pricing becoming prevalent, are at odds with each other. Given this conflict, is there a way for users to stay within their monthly data plans (data quotas) without suffering a noticeable degradation in video quality? In this paper, the authors develop an online ...

With 20 million installs a day, third-party apps are a major reason for the popularity and addictiveness of Facebook. Unfortunately, hackers have realized the potential of using apps for spreading malware and spam. The problem is already significant, as the people find that at least 13% of apps in their dataset are malicious. So far, ...

Passwords continue to prevail on the web as the primary method for user authentication despite their well-known security and usability drawbacks. Password managers offer some improvement without requiring server-side changes. In this paper, the authors evaluate the security of dual-possession authentication, an authentication approach offering encrypted storage of passwords and theft-resistance without the use of ...