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.