IMDEA Networks Institute Digital Repository
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1915 research outputs found
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Fine-grained LTE Radio Link Estimation for Mobile Phones
Get PDFRecently, spectrum optimization solutions require mobile phones to obtain precise, accurate and fine-grained estimates of the radio link data rate. In particular, the effectiveness of anticipatory schemes depends on the granularity of these measurements. In this paper we use a reliable LTE control channel sniffer (OWL) to extensively compare mobile phone measurements against exact LTE radio link data rates. We also provide a detailed study of latencies measured on mobile phones, the sniffer, and a server to which the phone is connected. In this study, we show that mobile phones can accurately (if slightly biased) estimate the physical radio link data rate. We highlight the differences among measurements obtained using different mobile phones, communication technologies and protocols.TRUEpu
A Survey of Anticipatory Mobile Networking: Context-Based Classification, Prediction Methodologies, and Optimization Techniques
Get PDFA growing trend for information technology is to not just react to changes, but anticipate them as much as possible. This paradigm made modern solutions, such as recommendation systems, a ubiquitous presence in today’s digital transactions. Anticipatory networking extends the idea to communication technologies by studying patterns and periodicity in human behavior and network dynamics to optimize network performance. This survey collects and analyzes recent papers leveraging context information to forecast the evolution of network conditions and, in turn, to improve network performance. In particular, we identify the main prediction and optimization tools adopted in this body of work and link them with objectives and constraints of the typical applications and scenarios. Finally, we consider open challenges and research directions to make anticipatory networking part of next generation networks.pu
Preserving Mobile Subscriber Privacy in Open Datasets of Spatiotemporal Trajectories
Get PDFMobile network operators can track subscribers via
passive or active monitoring of device locations. The recorded trajectories offer an unprecedented outlook on the activities of large user populations, which enables developing new networking solutions and services, and scaling up studies across research disciplines. Yet, the disclosure of individual trajectories raises significant privacy concerns: thus, these data are often protected
by restrictive non-disclosure agreements that limit their availability and impede potential usages. In this paper, we contribute to the development of technical solutions to the problem of privacy-preserving publishing of spatiotemporal trajectories of mobile subscribers. We propose an algorithm that generalizes the data so that they satisfy kτ,ǫ-anonymity, an original privacy criterion that thwarts attacks on trajectories. Evaluations with real-world datasets demonstrate that our algorithm attains its
objective while retaining a substantial level of accuracy in the data. Our work is a step forward in the direction of open, privacy-preserving datasets of spatiotemporal trajectories.TRUEpu
7 in 10 smartphone apps share your data with third-party services
No full textOriginal Article:
https://theconversation.com/7-in-10-smartphone-apps-share-your-data-with-third-party-services-72404Our mobile phones can reveal a lot about ourselves: where we live and work; who our family, friends and acquaintances are; how (and even what) we communicate with them; and our personal habits. With all the information stored on them, it isn’t surprising that mobile device users take steps to protect their privacy, like using PINs or passcodes to unlock their phones. The research that we and our colleagues are doing identifies and explores a significant threat that most people miss: More than 70 percent of smartphone apps are reporting personal data to third-party tracking companies like Google Analytics, the Facebook Graph API or Crashlytics.pu
Human-driven Decision-making in Accessing Distributed Resources
No full textInformation and Communication Technologies enable the generation and dissemination of information that can enhance tremendously our awareness about the environment and its resources. This resource awareness provides enhanced service opportunities but it may also create contention and congestion penalties in distributed, uncoordinated resource environments, to the point of making such information provision counter-productive. This talk employs a simple binary model that can represent a wide range of decision formulations for this environment (to compete or not to compete for the resources) with a ternary cost structure (success vs failure vs not competing). The case of fully rational (strategic) decision-making is briefly presented and the cost of anarchy (due to the lack of coordination) is discussed. Since humans who ultimately take decisions have limitations, some models for human-driven decision making are presented, reflecting computational/cognitive human limitations or biases. It is shown that bounded rationality decisions can be as or even more effective than those under the full rationality model. Finally, and as time permits, alternative to the fully uncoordinated approaches are discussed in an effort to reduce the cost of anarchy, along with their potential benefits and drawbacks.TRUEpu
Reshaping the African Internet: From Scattered Islands to a Connected Continent
Get PDFDOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2017.09.006. Paper history: Received 24 March 2017, Revised 20 July 2017, Accepted 2 September 2017, Available online 22 September 2017There is an increasing awareness amongst developing regions on the importance of localizing Internet traffic in the quest for fast, affordable, and available Internet access. In this paper, we focus on Africa, where 37 IXPs are currently interconnecting local ISPs, but mostly at the country level. An option to enrich connectivity on the continent and incentivize content providers to establish presence in the region is to interconnect ISPs present at isolated IXPs by creating a distributed IXP layout spanning the continent. The goal of this paper is to investigate whether such IXP interconnection would be possible, and if successful, to estimate the best-case benefits that could be realized in terms of traffic localization and performance. Our hope is that quantitatively demonstrating the benefits will provide incentives for ISPs to intensify their peering relationships in the region. However, it is challenging to estimate this best-case scenario, due to numerous economic, political, and geographical factors influencing the region. Towards this end, we begin with a thorough analysis of the environment in Africa. We then investigate a naive approach to IXP interconnection, which shows that a theoretically optimal solution would be infeasible in practice due to the prevailing socio-economic conditions in the region. We, therefore, provide an innovative, realistic four-step interconnection scheme to achieve the distributed IXP layout that considers and parameterizes external socio-economic factors using publicly available datasets. We demonstrate that our constrained solution doubles the percentage of continental intra-African paths, reduces their lengths, and drastically decreases the median of their RTTs as well as RTTs to ASes hosting the top 10 global and top 10 regional Alexa websites. Our approach highlights how, given real-world constraints, a solution requires careful considerations in order to be practically realizable.pu
5G Millimeter-Wave and D2D Symbiosis: 60 GHz for Proximity-based Services
Get PDFThe characteristics of two key communication technologies in 5G: Device-to-Device (D2D) and millimeter-wave (mmWave), are complementary. While D2D facilitates the communication of nearby mobile nodes, mmWave provides very high throughput short-range links by using carrier frequencies beyond 30 GHz, and reduces interference by using directional communication. This directly addresses two critical issues in cellular networks, namely, the increasing number of users and the high throughput requirements. In this paper, we explore the above symbiosis of D2D and mmWave. More precisely, we integrate mmWave communications into the 3GPP framework for D2D communication, i.e., Proximity-based Services. To this end, we design the message exchange among entities in the ProSe Architecture to support the discovery, establishment and maintenance of mmWave links. Further, we evaluate the performance of a mmWave D2D system for the case of a picocell operating in the 60 GHz band. We experimentally analyze the benefits of combining D2D and 60 GHz communication. Our results show that this combination improves performance in terms of throughput by up to 2.3 times.pu
Poster: Can MPTCP Improve Performance for Dual-Band 60 GHz/5 GHz Clients?
Get PDFThis work conducts one of the first experimental studies of Multipath TCP (MPTCP) in dual-band 60 GHz/5 GHz WLANs using off-the-shelf hardware. We consider both uncoupled and different coupled congestion control algorithms, compare their performance and their potential to improve throughput over single path TCP, and uncover their limitations. In contrast to a recent study that reports reduced throughput with MPTCP compared to single path TCP over 60 GHz, our results show that significant performance improvements are possible, especially in the case of uncoupled congestion control. On the other hand, performance gains with coupled congestion control are lower as these algorithms often fail to fully utilize the capacity of both paths simultaneously. We also observe a pathological case that can lead to significantly reduced throughput with MPTCP regardless of the congestion control algorithm.TRUEpu
Statistical Multiplexing and Traffic Shaping Games for Network Slicing
Get PDFNext generation wireless architectures are expected to enable slices of shared wireless infrastructure which are customized to specific mobile operators/services. Given infrastructure costs and stochastic nature of mobile services' spatial loads, it is highly desirable to achieve efficient statistical multiplexing amongst network slices. We study a simple dynamic resource sharing policy which allocates a 'share' of a pool of (distributed) resources to each slice- Share Constrained Proportionally Fair (SCPF). We give a characterization of the achievable performance gains over static slicing, showing higher gains when a slice's spatial load is more 'imbalanced' than, and/or 'orthogonal' to, the aggregate network load. Under SCPF, traditional network dimensioning translates to a coupled share dimensioning problem, addressing the existence of a feasible share allocation given slices' expected loads and performance requirements. We provide a solution to robust share dimensioning for SCPF-based network slicing. Slices may wish to unilaterally manage their users' performance via admission control which maximizes their carried loads subject to performance requirements. We show this can be modeled as a "traffic shaping" game with an achievable Nash equilibrium. Under high loads, the equilibrium is explicitly characterized, as are the gains in the carried load under SCPF vs. static slicing. Detailed simulations of a wireless infrastructure supporting multiple slices with heterogeneous mobile loads show the fidelity of our models and range of validity of our high load equilibrium analysis.TRUEpu