The course registration for the Internet Routing Seminar is over and a good amount of students have registered for the course. The next step consists of assigning papers to students according to their choices. However, based on their choices I have created a small, non-representative paper popularity.

Paper Popularity

For the course registration, students have to pick five out of 23 papers and assign priorities to them (priority 1, …, 5). So every student has five distinct choices for possible topics. Based on these choices, I created a paper popularity rating by simply weighting the choices by their priority (amount of choices for a particular paper in priority 1 is weighted with a higher score than the same paper appearing in priority 5). I used the following weights: priority w_1=5, w_2=4, w_3=3, w_4=2, w_5=1. The weight is then computed by s = \sum_i=1^5 {a_i * w_i}, where a_i is the amount of votes per priority for a paper and w_i is the weight (see the last sentence). Following this procedure, I end up with the following paper priorities, where s indicates the score:

1. s=23 BGP routing policies in ISP networks
2. s=17 Building an AS-topology model that captures route diversity
3. s=15 A Light-Weight Distributed Scheme for Detecting IP Prefix Hijacks in Real-Time
4. s=14 An Analysis of the Skype Peer-to-Peer Internet Telephony Protocol
5. s=13 BubbleStorm: Resilient, Probabilistic, and Exhaustive Peer-to-Peer Search
6. s=12 OpenFlow: Enabling Innovation in Campus Networks
7. s=12 APT: A Practical Tunneling Architecture for Routing Scalability
8. s=10 Ant colonies for Adaptive Routing in Packet-switched Communications Networks
9. s=10 Incentive-Compatible Opportunistic Routing for Wireless Networks
10. s=9 Avoiding transient Loops during IGP Convergence in IP Networks
11. s=9 Ariadne: A Secure On-Demand Routing Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks
12. s=8 In VINI Veritas: Realistic and Controlled Network Experimentation
13. s=7 Interdomain traffic engineering with BGP
14. s=4 A Measurement-based Study of the Skype Peer-to-Peer VoIP Performance
15. s=3 Designing Extensible IP Router Software
16. s=3 HLP: A Next-generation Interdomain Routing Protocol
17. s=2 On Count-to-Infinity Induced Forwarding Loops in Ethernet Networks
18. s=1 Unified Energy-Efficient Routing for Multi-Hop Wireless Networks
19. s=1 Power Awareness in Network Design and Routing

19 papers have been selected by students, 4 have not been considered. Thus, 82 % of the pre-selected topics have been taken into account.

The new term starts at TU Berlin and our group offers an advanced seminar dealing with Internet routing (see details here). Today was the preparatory meeting where I introduced the basic concepts of this seminar and its topics. Slides covering all the details can be found here.

In contrast to previous seminars, I agreed to introduce a new feature; students can suggest papers as we do not want to stop them from working on interesting topics, if they can’t agree on the papers collected and suggested by us. I wonder how many students will take advantage of this, or it might turns out to be too much unessessary overhead (although I prepared a list of relevant conferences and linked their programs, students will have to investigate some amount of time in looking through them, which will of course not result in any grading benefit).

There is a tendency of more and more people from academia getting involved in blogging and thus provide valuable and interesting insights into their daily life as researchers. Christian Spannagel, assistant professor at PH Ludwigsburg, is an researcher who can be considered as an open scientist. Open scientists intend to make processes more transparent to the public, e.g. by blogging about interesting things. Similar to the idea of open scientists, there is also a tendency of having “open teaching“. Christian Spannagel is an ardent advocate of this method and opens up his teaching philosophy to the public where he wants to reflect his teaching methods, discussions and feedback of talks and classes.

I’m happy to see that others follow a similar path and provide more insight into their courses. Course CS263: Wireless Sensor Networks, which is a graduate seminar held in the spring term 2009 at Harvard University by Matt Welch, is covered by an official blog to post notes and musings of papers discussed in the class. The blog is highly interesting as it makes discussions within a seminar public. Speaking from my own experience, students come up with lots of interesting musings during discussions on a particular paper which are normally “lost” but are archived and published in this way.

It would be great if these examples would catch on, e.g. by having more reports on scientific conferences. As one example I would like to mention the NSDI’07 blog coverage.

Reference:

• Harvard CS263 Blog
• Blogging as a research project (about the course blog)

German blog posts on the concept of an open scientist:

• Der öffentliche Wissenschaftler
• Öffentliche Wissenschaft: Eine Bastelanleitung
• Der öffentliche Wissenschaftler: Diskussion zu Vorträgen
• Feedback zum öffentlichen Wissenschaftler
• Feedback zu meiner Lehre
• Ermunterung zum bloggenden Wissenschaftler
• Öffentliche Wissenschaft im Web 2.0

Today we had the last day of our blockseminar on Internet Measurement (see my post on day 1) and heard the following talks:

• nCap: Wire-speed Packet Capture and Transmission Improving Passive Packet Capture: Beyond Device Polling [Slides] [Student Paper] [Original Paper 1 Paper 2]
• DisCarte: A Disjunctive Internet Cartographer [Slides] [Student Paper] [My Blog Post] [Original Paper]

After completing the talks, we had a quite fruitful discussion on presentation style of every talk that will be hopefully helpful for the attending students. In general, I was really impressed by the quality of the talks. Some were really brilliant but all of them were unexpectedly good in general.

I really enjoyed this seminar and hope our advanced seminar on Internet Routing offered next term will be as interesting as this one.

Today was the first day of our two days blockseminar on Internet Measurement, in which I supervised two students. During the seminar, we addressed the following topics (papers) by talks held by students attending the seminar along with a discussion on the topic afterwards:

• Characterizing Files in the Modern Gnutella Network: A Measurement Study [Slides] [Student Paper] [Original Paper]
  Which files are shared on Gnutella and what are their characteristics? Besides studies that derived traces by hosting peers dedicated to provide measurement data, this paper describes data derived from crawls of the Gnutella network.
• Rarest First and Choke Algorithms Are Enough [Slides] [Student Paper] [Original Paper]
  This paper discusses why BitTorrent performs well and states that the Rarest First Algorithm and the Choke algorithm are enough to provide reasonable fairness, diversity of the content pieces and performance. Roughly speaking, Those are the key features that differentiate BitTorrent from other peer-to-peer file sharing protocols.
• Leveraging BitTorrent for End Host Measurements [Slides] [Student Paper] [Original Paper]
  How optimistic unchokes—provided by BitTorrent and essential for its functionality—can be exploited to perform end host measurements; a dedicated and modified BitTorrent client called BitProbes downloads two megabytes of data from peers—by acting as a freerider and not uploading downloaded data—and uses this communication for conducting host measurements.
  Some points that have been discussed: (1) the authors claim that downloading but not storing the data is enough to avoid legal issues. Is that really true? (2) During a sample 7 days crawl, the authors covered about 20% of the available autonomos systems (AS) in the Internet. What does this number mean? Is it a high coverage, or a low one? For the answe, one has to keep in mind that not all AS are likely to host BitTorrent clients (like enterprise networks).

• Unconstrained Endpoint Profiling (Googling the Internet) [Slides] [Student Paper] [Original Paper]
  How documents indexed by Google can be used to label IP addresses with applications run by a particular host
  The discussion mainly focused on the question whether the proposed method is really unconstrained as the title of the paper claims. Some key points: (1) The propsed method relys on Google, but the Google index varies (regional filtering etc.). (2) Existance of the deep web: not every available document is indexed by a particular search engine. (3) How dynamic are IP addresses? What if we want to label IPs of access providers which usually map to a set of users that used it in the past? (4) Can we trust data provided by the third parties (e.g. faked access log files etc.)?
  We agreed that this methodology seems good to discover trends but details have to be taken with a pinch of salt.
• I Tube, You Tube, Everybody Tubes: Analyzing the World’s Largest User Generated Content Video System [Slides] [Student Paper] [Original Paper1 Paper 2]
  What kind of videos are shared on YouTube and what is their access characteristics. See my blog post on this from October 2007.
• The Flattening Internet Topology: Natural Evolution, Unsightly Barnacles or Contrived Collapse? [Slides] [Student Paper] [Original Paper]
  This paper analyses a trend of big content provider building up WANs and tend to bypass Tier 1 providers to save transit costs and increase performance which flattens the Internet topology

For references to the original papers, the student papers (mostly in German) and slides, see the seminar webpage. The talks had a very high quality and the discussions were pretty interesting. So I’m really looking forward to day II.