Events — Colloquia & Seminars
Glasnost: Enabling End Users to Detect Traffic Differentiation
Speaker: Krishna Gummadi, Max-Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany
Date: Monday, November 16, 2009
Talk: 11:00 AM, 366 WVH
Abstract
Holding residential ISPs to their contractual or legal obligations of ``unlimited service'' or ``network neutrality'' is a hard problem because ISP traffic management policies are opaque to end users and governmental regulatory agencies. In this talk, I will describe our experiences with building and deploying Glasnost, a system that improves network transparency by enabling ordinary Internet users to detect whether their ISPs are shaping flows belonging to specific applications. I will focus on three key challenges we faced: (a) how to keep the barrier of usage low to attract large numbers of users, (b) how to infer traffic differentiation accurately; in particular, how to avoid false accusations of differentiation that adversely affect ISPs' reputation and business, (c) how to keep the system up-to-date with the continuously changing differentiation policies of ISPs world-wide. I will describe how Glasnost addresses each of these challenges in detail. We have deployed Glasnost in the wild for over a year. During this time more than 350,000 users from over 5,800 ISPs worldwide have used Glasnost to test their ISPs, validating many of our design choices. I will also show how data from individual Glasnost users can be aggregated to provide regulators and monitors with useful ISP-wide views of the deployment of various differentiation policies.Brief Biography
Krishna Gummadi leads the Networked Systems research group at the Max-Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany. He received his Ph.D. (2005) and M.S. (2002) degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle. He also holds a B.Tech (2000) degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.