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We study operational issues faced by Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) network owners and find that SME network management practices have stagnated over the past decade, despite many recent advances in network management. Many of these advances target hyperscalers and ISPs and cannot be directly applied to SME networks that are operated with vastly different constraints. In our work, we outline these constraints and explain how they impact challenges around debugging, namely: representing, reproducing, and remediating network problems. This article takes a fresh look at these challenges in the light of SME practices around collaborative debugging and presents a roadmap aimed to help resolve SME operational issues quickly.

Selecting a technical program committee (PC) for a conference or a workshop can be an intimidating and time consuming process. PC selection needs to balance several potential considerations; e.g., industry vs. academic participation, inclusion of under-represented communities, ensuring coverage over topic areas, among others. This paper presents the design of an open-source tool called EZ-PC which formulates these considerations as a simple constraint satisfaction problem to help PC chairs systematize this selection process. We report on some of the features we have incorporated and our experience in using the tool.

Conventional static datacenter (DC) network designs offer extreme cost vs. performance tradeoffs---simple leaf-spine networks are cost-effective but oversubscribed, while "fat tree"-like solutions offer good worst-case performance but are expensive. Recent results make a promising case for augmenting an oversubscribed network with reconfigurable inter-rack wireless or optical links. Inspired by the promise of reconfigurability, this paper presents FireFly, an inter-rack network solution that pushes DC network design to the extreme on three key fronts: (1) all links are reconfigurable; (2) all links are wireless; and (3) non top-of-rack switches are eliminated altogether. This vision, if realized, can offer significant benefits in terms of increased flexibility, reduced equipment cost, and minimal cabling complexity. In order to achieve this vision, we need to look beyond traditional RF wireless solutions due to their interference footprint which limits range and data rates. Thus, we make the case for using free-space optics (FSO). We demonstrate the viability of this architecture by (a) building a proof-of-concept prototype of a steerable small form factor FSO device using commodity components and (b) developing practical heuristics to address algorithmic and system-level challenges in network design and management.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has seen a significant resurgence in recent years. ICN promises benefits to users and service providers along several dimensions (e.g., performance, security, and mobility). These benefits, however, come at a non-trivial cost as many ICN proposals envision adding significant complexity to the network by having routers serve as content caches and support nearest-replica routing. This paper is driven by the simple question of whether this additional complexity is justified and if we can achieve these benefits in an incrementally deployable fashion. To this end, we use trace-driven simulations to analyze the quantitative benefits attributed to ICN (e.g., lower latency and congestion). Somewhat surprisingly, we find that pervasive caching and nearest-replica routing are not fundamentally necessary---most of the performance benefits can be achieved with simpler caching architectures. We also discuss how the qualitative benefits of ICN (e.g., security, mobility) can be achieved without any changes to the network. Building on these insights, we present a proof-of-concept design of an incrementally deployable ICN architecture.

Networks today rely on middleboxes to provide critical performance, security, and policy compliance capabilities. Achieving these benefits and ensuring that the traffic is directed through the desired sequence of middleboxes requires significant manual effort and operator expertise. In this respect, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) offers a promising alternative. Middleboxes, however, introduce new aspects (e.g., policy composition, resource management, packet modifications) that fall outside the purvey of traditional L2/L3 functions that SDN supports (e.g., access control or routing). This paper presents SIMPLE, a SDN-based policy enforcement layer for efficient middlebox-specific "traffic steering''. In designing SIMPLE, we take an explicit stance to work within the constraints of legacy middleboxes and existing SDN interfaces. To this end, we address algorithmic and system design challenges to demonstrate the feasibility of using SDN to simplify middlebox traffic steering. In doing so, we also take a significant step toward addressing industry concerns surrounding the ability of SDN to integrate with existing infrastructure and support L4-L7 capabilities.

Multimedia content is a dominant fraction of Internet usage today. At the same time, there is significant heterogeneity in video presentation modes and operating conditions of Internet-enabled devices that access such content. Users are often interested in the content, rather than the specific sources or the formats. The host-centric format of the current Internet does not support these requirements naturally. Neither do the recent data-centric naming proposals, since they rely on naming content based on raw byte-level hashing schemes. We argue that to meet these requirements, enabling content retrieval mechanisms to name and query directly for the underlying information is a good way forward. In addition to decoupling content from available sources and transfer protocols, these "information-aware names" or InfoNames explicitly decouple the information from content presentation factors as well. We envision an InfoName Resolution System (IRS) to resolve location based on InfoNames, while taking into account the operating conditions of devices. In this demo, we present an application to show how InfoNames can serve as presentation-invariant and portable names to fetch video content independent of device capabilities and resource constraints.