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 ...

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 ...

Debugging faults in complex networks often requires capturing and analyzing traffic at the packet level. In this paper, DataCenter Networks (DCNs) present unique challenges with their scale, traffic volume and diversity of faults. To troubleshoot faults in a timely manner, DCN administrators must identify affected packets inside large volume of traffic; track them across multiple ...

Many network functions executed in modern data centers, e.g., load balancing, application-level QoS (Quality of Service) and congestion control, exhibit three common properties at the data plane: they need to access and modify state, to perform computations and to access application semantics – this is critical since many network functions are best expressed in terms ...

The increasing need for ubiquitous Internet connectivity has led to the deployment of wireless access infrastructure, including public Wi-Fi networks used for mobile data offloading. Despite the density of public Wi-Fi hotspots especially in residential areas, these networks are severely underutilized, with an average of ten percent of active users and an average of one ...

Meraki is a cloud-based network management system which provides centralized configuration, monitoring and network troubleshooting tools across hundreds of thousands of sites worldwide. As part of its architecture, the Meraki system has built a database of time-series measurements of wireless link, client and application behavior for monitoring and debugging purposes. This paper studies an anonymized ...

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 ...