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