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You are currently browsing the The WING Blog blog archives for September, 2011.

Sep

28

Internet Governance and the United Nations

By Azer Bestavros

Interesting developments (and political maneuvers) are afoot at the United Nations as world powers jostle for control of the Internet, with China and Russia drawing a line in the sand with a joint document submitted to the General Assembly on Internet “Code of Conduct”. Quoting: “To settle any dispute resulting from the application of this Code through peaceful means and refrain from the threat or use of force.” Sounds like somebody is trying to cover their backs  : )

Here is the link: http://news.dot-nxt.com/2011/09/13/china-russia-security-code-of-conduct

Who said networking is boring?!

Sep

11

Serious about being Green

By Mark Crovella

One of the "best papers" at this year's Green Computing Workshop at SIGCOMM was Networking in the Long Emergency.   This paper is well worth a read, perhaps after you've looked at the striking slide deck.

The paper is sort of a "coming of age" message for green networking:  whereas most green networking papers have taken the general approach of "let's see what percent of energy consumption we can save", this paper starts by looking at why energy savings is so important.   Once you start from that perspective, research goals become rather different.

One of the valuable parts of the paper is that it explicitly enumerates a large body of principles and example research questions.

Sep

9

Groupon paper

By John Byers

While I'm thinking of it:  those of you who are interested in participating in Groupon's IPO (assuming it eventually does transpire) may want to peruse the recent measurement paper we posted on arXiv studying Groupon, LivingSocial, and the interplay between daily deals sites and social networks, namely Facebook and Yelp:

Daily Deals: Prediction, Social Diffusion, and Reputational Ramifications,
John W. Byers, Michael Mitzenmacher and Georgios Zervas.

Sep

9

Hourglass paper at SIGCOMM ’11

By John Byers

Easily the most widely discussed paper in hallway conversations at this year's SIGCOMM was this modeling paper:

The Evolution of Layered Protocol Stacks Leads to an Hourglass-Shaped Architecture, by Saamer Akhshabi and Constantine Dovrolis (Georgia Institute of Technology).

For those of you who enjoy controversy, or who are prepping for this year's DWE exam, I think reading this paper is worth your time.  Advocates for this paper thought that the topic is a fascinating one, and that trying to understand and model how an hourglass-shaped architecture arose is a worthwhile research line.  Detractors said (I'm paraphrasing using family-friendly language) that not only does the model fail to reflect or approximate reality, but the nature of an endeavor where you know the answer (hourglass) and contrive to build a model that produces the answer is bad science.

We decided to take this paper at the PC meeting in spite of its warts, since we knew it would lead to intense discussion and debate, and, as Jeff and I wrote in our opening remarks as PC co-chairs: "... we hope we took enough risky papers to get at least some of you upset."  We succeeded!