<html><body><div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000"><div>Sarthak Grover will present his General Exam on Friday, January 8, 2016 in CS 302 at 2pm.<br></div><div data-marker="__HEADERS__"><br>The members of his committee are Nick Feamster (Adviser), Kyle Jamieson, and Jennifer Rexford.<br><br>Everyone is invited to attend his talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below.<b><br><br></b></div><div>*Abstract*<br><br>With a large increase in broadband services and capacity, it has become<br>important to understand home network infrastructure and usage. Over the<br>past two years, we have studied home network usage from two perspectives:<br>the gateway and the ISP. In the first empirical study of home network<br>availability, infrastructure, and usage, we deployed routers running custom<br>firmware in multiple homes to collect measurements of home and Internet<br>connectivity, as well as how users use their home network. Our results<br>showed that half the home networks studied utilize less than half their<br>available capacity.<br><br>We followed up to this work by studying the relationship between traffic<br>demand and service tier upgrades from the perspective of ISPs. In a unique<br>controlled experiment, we compare two groups of Comcast subscribers from<br>the same city: a control group (105 Mbps) and a randomly selected treatment<br>group that was upgraded to 250 Mbps without their knowledge. We study how<br>users who are already on service plans with high downstream throughput<br>respond to a higher service tier (upgraded unknowingly), as compared to a<br>similar control group. To our surprise, subscribers with moderate traffic<br>demands increase their usage in response to a service-tier upgrade<br>relatively more than high-volume subscribers do. We speculate that even<br>though these users may not take advantage of the full available capacity,<br>the service tier increase generally improves performance, which causes them<br>to use the Internet more than they otherwise would have.<br><br><br>*Reading List*<br><br>1. Bischof, Zachary S., Fabián E. Bustamante, and Rade Stanojevic. "Need, want, can afford: </div><div>Broadband markets and the behavior of users." In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on</div><div> Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 73-86. ACM, 2014.<br> </div><div> 2. Kreibich, Christian, Nicholas Weaver, Boris Nechaev, and Vern Paxson.<br> "Netalyzr: illuminating the edge network." In Proceedings of the 10th<br> ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement, pp. 246-259. ACM, 2010.<br> </div><div>3. Quan, Lin, John Heidemann, and Yuri Pradkin. "When the internet sleeps:<br> correlating diurnal networks with external factors." In Proceedings of<br> the 2014 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 87-100. ACM,<br> 2014.</div><div><br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div>4.Maier, Gregor, Anja Feldmann, Vern Paxson, and Mark Allman. "On dominant<br> characteristics of residential broadband internet traffic." InProceedings<br> of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference,<br> pp. 90-102. ACM, 2009.<br> 5.<br><br> Dicioccio, Lucas, Renata Teixeira, and Catherine Rosenberg. "Measuring<br> home networks with homenet profiler." In Passive and Active Measurement,<br> pp. 176-186. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013.<br> </div><div> 6.Zheleva, Mariya, Paul Schmitt, Morgan Vigil, and Elizabeth Belding. "The<br> increased bandwidth fallacy: performance and usage in rural<br>zambia." InProceedings of the 4th Annual Symposium on Computing for Development, p. 2. ACM,<br> 2013.<br> </div><div> 7.Cho, Kenjiro, Kensuke Fukuda, Hiroshi Esaki, and Akira Kato. "The impact<br> and implications of the growth in residential user-to-user traffic." In ACM<br> SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 207-218. ACM,<br> 2006.<br> </div><div>8.Paxson, Vern. "End-to-end routing behavior in the Internet." Networking,<br> IEEE/ACM Transactions on 5, no. 5 (1997): 601-615.<br> </div><div>9.Paxson, Vern. "Strategies for sound internet measurement." In Proceedings<br> of the 4th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement, pp. 263-271.<br> ACM, 2004.<br> </div><div>10.Calvert, Kenneth L., W. Keith Edwards, and Rebecca E. Grinter. "Moving<br> Toward the Middle: The Case Against the End-to-End Argument in Home<br> Networking." In HotNets. 2007.<br> </div><div>11.Sundaresan, Srikanth, Walter De Donato, Nick Feamster, Renata Teixeira,<br> Sam Crawford, and Antonio Pescapè. "Broadband internet performance: a view<br> from the gateway." In ACM SIGCOMM computer communication review, vol.<br> 41, no. 4, pp. 134-145. ACM, 2011.<br> </div><div>12.Peterson, Larry L., and Bruce S. Davie. Computer networks: a systems<br> approach. Elsevier, 2007.<br> </div><div>13.Grover, Sarthak, Mi Seon Park, Srikanth Sundaresan, Sam Burnett, Hyojoon<br> Kim, Bharath Ravi, and Nick Feamster. "Peeking behind the NAT: an empirical<br> study of home networks." In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on<br> Internet measurement conference, pp. 377-390. ACM, 2013.<br> </div><div>14.Grover, Sarthak, Roya Ensafi, and Nick Feamster. “A case study of<br> traffic demand response to broadband service-plan upgrades.” In Proceedings<br> of the 2016 Passive and Active Measurement Conference. 2016.<br><br></div></div></body></html>