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The quality of experience with the mobile web remains poor, partially as a result of complex websites and design choices that worsen performance, particularly for users in suboptimal networks or devices. Prior proposed solutions have seen limited adoption due in part to the demand they place on developers and content providers, and the performing infrastructure needed to support them. We argue that Document and Permissions Policies -- an ongoing effort to enforce good practices on web design -- may offer the basis for a readily-available and easily-adoptable solution. In this paper, we evaluate the potential performance cost of violating well-understood policies and how common such violations are in today's web. Our analysis show, for example, that controlling for unsized-media policy, something applicable to 70% of the top-1million websites, can indeed reduce Cumulative Layout Shift metric., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, submitted to HotMobile 2021

The closed design of mobile devices -- with the increased security and consistent user interfaces -- is in large part responsible for their becoming the dominant platform for accessing the Internet. These benefits, however, are not without a cost. Their operation of mobile devices and their apps is not easy to understand by either users or operators. We argue for recovering transparency and control on mobile devices through an extensible platform that can intercept and modify traffic before leaving the device or, on arrival, before it reaches the operating system. Conceptually, this is the same view of the traffic that a traditional middlebox would have at the far end of the first link in the network path. We call this platform ``middlebox zero'' or MBZ. By being on-board, MBZ also leverages local context as it processes the traffic and complements the network-wide view of standard middleboxes. We discuss the challenges of the MBZ approach, sketch a working design, and illustrate its potential with some concrete examples., Comment: The paper is a position piece under review

In this paper, we empirically demonstrate the growing importance of reliability by measuring its effect on user behavior. We present an approach for broadband reliability characterization using data collected by many emerging national initiatives to study broadband and apply it to the data gathered by the Federal Communications Commission's Measuring Broadband America project. Motivated by our findings, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a practical approach for improving the reliability of broadband Internet access with multihoming., Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures, 6 tables

An accurate Internet topology graph is important in many areas of networking, from understanding ISP business relationships to diagnosing network anomalies. Most Internet mapping efforts have derived the network structure, at the level of interconnected autonomous systems (ASes), from a rather limited set of vantage points. In this paper, we argue that a promising approach to revealing the hidden areas of the Internet topology is through active measurement from an observation platform that scales with the growing Internet. By leveraging measurements performed by an extension to a popular P2P system, we show that this approach indeed exposes significant new topological information. Our study is based on traceroute measurements from more than 992,000 IPs in over 3,700 ASes distributed across the Internet hierarchy, many in regions of the Internet not covered by publicly available path information. To address this issue we develop heuristics that identify 23,914 new AS links not visible in the publicly-available BGP data-12.86 percent more customer-provider links and 40.99 percent more peering links, than previously reported. We validate our heuristics using data from a tier-1 ISP, and show that they successfully filter out all false links introduced by public IP-to-AS mapping. We analyze properties of the Internet graph that includes these new links and characterize why they are missing. Finally, we have made the identified set of links and their inferred relationships publicly available. © 1968-2012 IEEE.

Tens of millions of individuals around the world use decentralized content distribution systems, a fact of growing social, economic, and technological importance. These sharing systems are poorly understood because, unlike in other technosocial systems, it is difficult to gather large-scale data about user behavior. Here, we investigate user activity patterns and the socioeconomic factors that could explain the behavior. Our analysis reveals that (i) the ecosystem is heterogeneous at several levels: content types are heterogeneous, users specialize in a few content types, and countries are heterogeneous in user profiles; and (ii) there is a strong correlation between socioeconomic indicators of a country and users behavior. Our findings open a research area on the dynamics of decentralized sharing ecosystems and the socioeconomic factors affecting them, and may have implications for the design of algorithms and for policymaking.

Ad-hoc wireless communication among highly dynamic, mobile nodes in a urban network is a critical capability for a wide range of important applications including automated vehicles, real-time traffic monitoring, and battleground communication. When evaluating application performance through simulation, a realistic mobility model for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) is critical for accurate results. This technical report discusses the implementation of STRAW, a new mobility model for VANETs in which nodes move according to a realistic vehicular traffic model on roads defined by real street map data. The challenge is to create a traffic model that accounts for individual vehicle motion without incurring significant overhead relative to the cost of performing the wireless network simulation. We identify essential and optional techniques for modeling vehicular motion that can be integrated into any wireless network simulator. We then detail choices we made in implementing STRAW., The original document contains color images. Presented at the 10th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium (ICCRTS 2005) held in McLean, VA on 13-16 Jun 2005. Published in the Proceedings of the 10th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium (ICCRTS 2005) Jun 2005.