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The Internet is going through a massive infrastructural revolution with the advent of low-flying satellite networks, 5/6G, WiFi7, and hollow-core fiber deployments. While these networks could unleash enhanced connectivity and new capabilities, it is critical to understand the performance characteristics to efficiently drive applications over them. Low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite mega-constellations like SpaceX Starlink aim to offer broad coverage and low latencies at the expense of high orbital dynamics leading to continuous latency changes and frequent satellite hand-offs. This paper aims to quantify Starlink's latency and its variations and components using a real testbed spanning multiple latitudes from the North to the South of Europe. We identify tail latencies as a problem. We develop predictors for latency and throughput and show their utility in improving application performance by up to 25%. We also explore how transport protocols can be optimized for LEO networks and show that this can improve throughput by up to 115% (with only a 5% increase in latency). Also, our measurement testbed with a footprint across multiple locations offers unique trigger-based scheduling capabilities that are necessary to quantify the impact of LEO dynamics., Comment: 16 pages

The growing demand for connecting with each other across the world has proved to be a boon to the growth of social media platforms. But when it comes to ensuring the privacy and security of the platform, the control is in hands of few monopolies. Some claim to provide a secure medium of communication but their exploitation of users and misusing users' data with their centralized control over the policies has led to various controversies. Lack of trust towards these organisations have made people skeptical towards using these applications for extremely secure communication use-cases. Thus, a system with no central organisation in control and a trustless network is required. A trustless network is a network which does not requires the participants (users) to trust any central authority. These nodes themselves, as a group, can be trusted to make a decision which aligns with the interests of all. This is accompanied by a distributed network, where peers are connected to each other to form a mesh-like network called Swarm. This distributed network of connected peers is often attributed as the internet of tomorrow. The total number of monthly active users on the top 3 chat applications surpassed 4 billion users in July 2019. As of Oct 2020, WhatsApp alone has 2 billion monthly active users sending around 100 billion messages per day. With such vast number of people relying on chat applications, making these applications highly secure becomes a task of paramount importance.

In this emerging world of connected devices, the need for more computing devices with a focus on delay-sensitive application is critical. In this paper, we propose a priority-queue based Fog computing architecture combined with dynamic scalability of fog devices, which not only reduces the delay experienced by delay-sensitive tasks by categorizing the delay-sensitive and delay-insensitive tasks, but also dynamically allocates the fog devices within the network depending upon the computation load for reducing the power consumption. The results show that the proposed algorithm is able to achieve a significantly lower delay for both delay-sensitive and -insensitive tasks when compared with other related schemes with a 14.5% lower power consumption., Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures

Providing high-speed Internet service using satellite network has attracted researchers from both academia and industry mainly due to the characteristics of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks such as global coverage, scalability, and lower transmission delay. With the recent advancements in the Software-Defined Network (SDN), implementation of SDN in Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) can help to achieve the set goals for 5G and beyond networks. Since satellite networks have a distinct architecture, some of the traditional protocols no longer remain useful. Therefore, to satisfy the diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for a variety of applications, we propose a novel and centralized QoS-aware routing algorithm, called fybrrLink in which the global view of the network in SDN is utilized. We implement a modified Bresenham's algorithm and Dijkstra's algorithm to find the optimal path in a significantly reduced computation time. Also, taking advantage of the deterministic satellite constellation, we propose a flow rule transfer algorithm and a topology monitoring algorithm. Further, fybrrLink is evaluated with multiple NS3 simulations, and results confirm its supremacy over other state-of-the-art algorithms.

The demand for streaming media and live video conferencing is at peak and expected to grow further, thereby the need for low-cost streaming services with better quality and lower latency is essential. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel peer-to-peer (P2P) live streaming platform, called fybrrStream, where a logical mesh and physical tree i.e., hybrid topology-based approach is leveraged for low latency streaming. fybrrStream distributes the load on participating peers in a hierarchical manner by considering their network bandwidth, network latency, and node stability. fybrrStream costs as low as the cost of just hosting a light-weight website and the performance is comparable to the existing state-of-the-art media streaming services. We evaluated and tested the proposed fybrrStream platform with real-field experiments using 50+ users spread across India and results obtained show significant improvements in the live streaming performance over other schemes.

We provide closed-form approximations to the performance gain achieved in a RIS-assisted communication. We then consider a network deployment of RIS and Transmitter-Receiver pairs and use these approximate expressions to provide equivalence models which state that the performance of a RIS-equipped network is similar to the performance of an appropriately spatially scaled system. We provide a way of assigning available RIS to assist communication between several transmitter-receiver pairs. Several such approximations are expected to spawn from this study, with more clarity on structural aspects of the gains achieved in RIS-assisted communications., Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures