[talks] Sarthak Grover will present his General Exam on Friday, January 8, 2016 in CS 302 at 2pm.

[Nicki Gotsis]

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. 

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