The Internet has evolved greatly from its original incarnation. For instance, the vast majority of current Internet usage is data retrieval and service access, whereas the architecture was designed around host-to-host applications such as telnet and ftp. Moreover, the original Internet was a purely transparent carrier of packets, but now the various network stakeholders use middleboxes to improve security and accelerate applications. To adapt to these changes, we propose the Data-Oriented Network Architecture (DONA), which involves a clean-slate redesign of Internet naming and name resolution. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.2.5 [Computer-Communication Networks]: Local and Wide-

Many contemporary approaches for speeding up large file transfers attempt to download chunks of a data object from multiple sources. Systems such as BitTorrent quickly locate sources that have an exact copy of the desired object, but they are unable to use sources that serve similar but non-identical objects. Other systems automatically exploit cross-file similarity by identifying sources for each chunk of the object. These systems, however, require a number of lookups proportional to the number of chunks in the object and a mapping for each unique chunk in every identical and similar object to its corresponding sources. Thus, the lookups and mappings in such a system can be quite large, limiting its scalability. This paper presents a hybrid system that provides the best of both approaches, locating identical and similar sources for data objects using a constant number of lookups and inserting a constant number of mappings per object. We first demonstrate through extensive data analysis that similarity does exist among objects of popular file types, and that making use of it can sometimes substantially improve download times. Next, we describe handprinting, a technique that allows clients to locate similar sources using a constant number of lookups and mappings. Finally, we describe the design, implementation and evaluation of Similarity-Enhanced Transfer (SET), a system that uses this technique to download objects. Our experimental evaluation shows that by using sources of similar objects, SET is able to significantly out-perform an equivalently configured BitTorrent. 1

We show how to build cheap and large CAMs, or CLAMs, using a combination of DRAM and flash memory. These are targeted at emerging data-intensive networked systems that require massive hash tables running into a hundred GB or more, with items being inserted, updated and looked up at a rapid rate. For such systems, using DRAM to maintain hash tables is quite expensive, while on-disk approaches are too slow. In contrast, CLAMs cost nearly the same as using existing on-disk approaches but offer orders of magnitude better performance. Our design leverages an efficient flash-oriented data-structure called BufferHash that significantly lowers the amortized cost of random hash insertions and updates on flash. BufferHash also supports flexible CLAM eviction policies. We prototype CLAMs using SSDs from two different vendors. We find that they can offer average insert and lookup latencies of 0.006ms and 0.06ms (for a 40 % lookup success rate), respectively. We show that using our CLAM prototype significantly improves the speed and effectiveness of WAN optimizers. 1

Wide-area network (WAN) accelerators operate by compressing redundant network traffic from point-to-point communications, enabling higher effective bandwidth. Unfortunately, while network bandwidth is scarce and expensive in the developing world, current WAN accelerators are designed for enterprise use, and are a poor fit in these environments. We present Wanax, a WAN accelerator designed for developing-world deployments. It uses a novel multiresolution chunking (MRC) scheme that provides high compression rates and high disk performance for a variety of content, while using much less memory than existing approaches. Wanax exploits the design of MRC to perform intelligent load shedding to maximize throughput when running on resource-limited shared platforms. Finally, Wanax exploits the mesh network environments being deployed in the developing world, instead of just the star topologies common in enterprise branch offices. 1

We contend that a new networking API could better serve the needs of data- and service-oriented applications, and could more easily map to heterogeneous environments, than the pervasive Sockets API does. In this paper, we present an initial design of a networking API based on the publish/subscribe paradigm, along with an exploration of its security implications, examples to demonstrate several common use cases, and a discussion of how the implementation of such an API could leverage a wide range of networking technologies. We propose this model not as a final design but as the first step towards a wider community discussion of the need for a modern communications API. 1

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of Ditto, a system that opportunistically caches overheard data to improve subsequent transfer throughput in wireless mesh networks. While mesh networks have been proposed as a way to provide cheap, easily deployable Internet access, they must maintain high transfer throughput to be able to compete with other last-mile technologies. Unfortunately, doing so is difficult because multi-hop wireless transmissions interfere with each other, reducing the available capacity on the network. This problem is particularly severe in common gateway-based scenarios in which nearly all transmissions go through one or a few gateways from the mesh network to the Internet. Ditto exploits on-path as well as opportunistic caching based on overhearing to improve the throughput of data transfers and to reduce load on the gateways. It uses contentbased naming to provide application independent caching at the granularity of small chunks, a feature that is key to being able to cache partially overheard data transfers. Our evaluation of Ditto shows that it can achieve significant performance gains for cached data, increasing throughput by up to 7x over simpler on-path caching schemes, and by up to an order of magnitude over no caching.

Application-independent Redundancy Elimination (RE), or identifying and removing repeated content from network transfers, has been used with great success for improving network performance on enterprise access links. Recently, there is growing interest for supporting RE as a network-wide service. Such a network-wide RE service benefits ISPs by reducing link loads and increasing the effective network capacity to better accommodate the increasing number of bandwidth-intensive applications. Further, a networkwide RE service democratizes the benefits of RE to all end-to-end traffic and improves application performance by increasing throughput and reducing latencies. While the vision of a network-wide RE service is appealing, realizing it in practice is challenging. In particular, extending singlevantage-point RE solutions designed for enterprise access links to the network-wide case is inefficient and/or requires modifying routing policies. We present SmartRE, a practical and efficient architecture for network-wide RE. We show that SmartRE can enable more effective utilization of the available resources at network devices, and thus can magnify the overall benefits of network-wide RE. We prototype our algorithms using Click and test our framework extensively using several real and synthetic traces.

Content-based naming (CBN) enables content sharing across similar files by breaking files into positionindependent chunks and naming these chunks using hashes of their contents. While a number of research systems have recently used custom CBN approaches internally to good effect, there has not yet been any mechanism to use CBN in a general-purpose way. In this paper, we demonstrate a practical approach to applying CBN without requiring disruptive changes to end systems. We develop CZIP, a CBN compression scheme which reduces data sizes by eliminating redundant chunks, compresses chunks using existing schemes, and facilitates sharing within files, across files, and across machines by explicitly exposing CBN chunk hashes. CZIPaware caching systems can exploit the CBN information to reduce storage space, reduce bandwidth consumption, and increase performance, while content providers and middleboxes can selectively encode their most suitable content. We show that CZIP compares well to standalone compression schemes, that a CBN cache for CZIP is easily implemented, and that a CZIP-aware CDN produces significant benefits. 1

Abstract — In this paper, we investigate the problem of highly available, massive-scale file distribution in the Internet. To this end, we conduct a large-scale measurement study of BitTorrent, a popular class of systems that use swarms of actively downloading peers to assist each other in file distribution. The first generation of BitTorrent systems used a central tracker to enable coordination among peers, resulting in low availability due to the tracker’s single point of failure. Our study analyzes the prevalence and impact of two recent trends to improve BitTorrent availability: (i) use of multiple trackers, and (ii) use of Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs), both of which also help to balance load better. The study considered more than 1,400 trackers and 24,000 DHT nodes (extracted from about 20,000 torrents) over a period of two months. We find that both trends improve availability, but for different and somewhat unexpected reasons. Our findings include: (i) multiple trackers improve availability, but the improvement largely comes from the choice of a single highly available tracker, (ii) such improvement is reduced by the presence of correlated failures, (iii) multiple trackers can significantly reduce the connectivity of the overlay formed by peers, (iv) the DHT improves information availability, but induces a higher response latency to peer queries. I.

This paper presents dsync, a file transfer system that can dynamically adapt to a wide variety of environments. While many transfer systems work well in their specialized context, their performance comes at the cost of generality, and they perform poorly when used elsewhere. In contrast, dsync adapts to its environment by intelligently determining which of its available resources is the best to use at any given time. The resources dsync can draw from include the sender, the local disk, and network peers. While combining these resources may appear easy, in practice it is difficult because these resources may have widely different performance or contend with each other. In particular, the paper presents a novel mechanism that enables dsync to aggressively search the receiver’s local disk for useful data without interfering with concurrent network transfers. Our evaluation on several workloads in various network environments shows that dsync outperforms existing systems by a factor of 1.4 to 5 in one-to-one and one-to-many transfers. 1