{"title":"Reflections on being CCR editor 2008--2012","authors":"S. Keshav","doi":"10.1145/3371934.3371946","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3371934.3371946","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses my personal view of being Editor of CCR from 2008 to 2012.","PeriodicalId":403234,"journal":{"name":"Comput. Commun. Rev.","volume":"100 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122552572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ryan Beckett, Ratul Mahajan, T. Millstein, J. Padhye, D. Walker
{"title":"Don't mind the gap: Bridging network-wide objectives and device-level configurations: brief reflections on abstractions for network programming","authors":"Ryan Beckett, Ratul Mahajan, T. Millstein, J. Padhye, D. Walker","doi":"10.1145/3371934.3371965","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3371934.3371965","url":null,"abstract":"We reflect on the historical context that lead to Propane, a high-level language and compiler to help network operators bridge the gap between network-wide routing objectives and low-level configurations of devices that run complex, distributed protocols. We also highlight the primary contributions that Propane made to the networking literature and describe ongoing challenges. We conclude with an important lesson learned from the experience.","PeriodicalId":403234,"journal":{"name":"Comput. Commun. Rev.","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115281861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Never waste a mid-life crisis: change for the better","authors":"J. Rexford","doi":"10.1145/3371934.3371939","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3371934.3371939","url":null,"abstract":"Creating a better Internet---a global communications infrastructure that is more secure, reliable, performant, flexible, and so on---is one of the grand challenges of our time. Yet, making substantive change to such a large, distributed, operational network is inherently difficult. This position paper argues that the networking research community should come together and adopt a sort of \"ambitious pragmatism\" that tackles the big problems while identifying the practical steps to take along the way. The community can work together to (i) identify and precisely formulate the main problems we need to address, (ii) more deeply understand a diverse array of practical constraints (including business drivers, economic incentives, government policies, and more), and (iii) create new deployment platforms and institutional structures to enable good research ideas to \"cross the chasm\" to deployment.","PeriodicalId":403234,"journal":{"name":"Comput. Commun. Rev.","volume":"212 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116150553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Waleed Iqbal, Junaid Qadir, Saeed-Ul Hassan, R. T. Javed, A. Mian, J. Crowcroft, Gareth Tyson
{"title":"Five decades of the ACM special interest group on data communications (SIGCOMM): a bibliometric perspective","authors":"Waleed Iqbal, Junaid Qadir, Saeed-Ul Hassan, R. T. Javed, A. Mian, J. Crowcroft, Gareth Tyson","doi":"10.1145/3371934.3371948","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3371934.3371948","url":null,"abstract":"The ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM) has been a major research forum for fifty years. This community has had a major impact on the history of the Internet, and therefore we argue its exploration may reveal fundamental insights into the evolution of networking technologies around the globe. Hence, on the 50th anniversary of SIGCOMM, we take this opportunity to reflect upon its progress and achievements, through the lens of its various publication outlets, e.g., the SIGCOMM conference, IMC, CoNEXT, HotNets. Our analysis takes several perspectives, looking at authors, countries, institutes and papers. We explore trends in co-authorship, country-based productivity, and knowledge flow to and from SIGCOMM venues using bibliometric techniques. We hope this study will serve as a valuable resource for the computer networking community.","PeriodicalId":403234,"journal":{"name":"Comput. Commun. Rev.","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126785592","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reflections on \"analysis and simulation of a fair queueing algorithm\"","authors":"S. Keshav","doi":"10.1145/3371934.3371952","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3371934.3371952","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses my personal view of the events that led to the publication of the paper \"Analysis and Simulation of a Fair Queueing Algorithm\" that won a Test-of-Time Award in 2007.","PeriodicalId":403234,"journal":{"name":"Comput. Commun. Rev.","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128207814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The July 2019 issue","authors":"O. Bonaventure","doi":"10.1145/3371927.3371928","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3371927.3371928","url":null,"abstract":"This July 2019 issue contains two technical papers and three editorial notes. In \"Securing Linux with a Faster and Scalable IPtables\", Sebastiano Miano and his colleagues revisit how Linux firewalls work. Since version 2.4.0 of the Linux kernel, iptables has been the standard way of defining firewall rules in Linux. These iptables are widely used, but writing and maintaining them can be difficult. Furthermore, they have some limitations in terms of performance. This paper leverages the eBPF virtual machine that is included in the Linux kernel to propose a replacement for iptables that preserves their semantics while providing improved performance. They release their implementation and evaluate its performance in details.","PeriodicalId":403234,"journal":{"name":"Comput. Commun. Rev.","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115987700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reflections on \"a control-theoretic approach to flow control\"","authors":"S. Keshav","doi":"10.1145/3371934.3371954","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3371934.3371954","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses the events that led to the publication of my paper 'A Control-Theoretic Approach to Flow Control' that won the Best Student Paper Award in 1991 and a Test-of-Time Award in 2007.","PeriodicalId":403234,"journal":{"name":"Comput. Commun. Rev.","volume":"301 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116254740","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Aisha Mushtaq, R. Mittal, J. McCauley, Mohammad Alizadeh, S. Ratnasamy, S. Shenker
{"title":"Datacenter congestion control: identifying what is essential and making it practical","authors":"Aisha Mushtaq, R. Mittal, J. McCauley, Mohammad Alizadeh, S. Ratnasamy, S. Shenker","doi":"10.1145/3371927.3371932","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3371927.3371932","url":null,"abstract":"Recent years have seen a slew of papers on datacenter congestion control mechanisms. In this editorial, we ask whether the bulk of this research is needed for the common case where congestion control involves hosts responding to simple congestion signals from the network and the performance goal is reducing some average measure of flow completion time. We raise this question because we find that, out of all the possible variations one could make in congestion control algorithms, the most essential feature is the switch scheduling algorithm. More specifically, we find that congestion control mechanisms that use Shortest-Remaining-Processing-Time (SRPT) achieve superior performance as long as the rate-setting algorithm at the host is reasonable. We further find that while SRPT's performance is quite robust to host behaviors, the performance of schemes that use scheduling algorithms like FIFO or Fair Queuing depend far more crucially on the rate-setting algorithm, and their performance is typically worse than what can be achieved with SRPT. Given these findings, we then ask whether it is practical to realize SRPT in switches without requiring custom hardware. We observe that approximate and deployable SRPT (ADS) designs exist, which leverage the small number of priority queues supported in almost all commodity switches, and require only software changes in the host and the switches. Our evaluations with one very simple ADS design shows that it can achieve performance close to true SRPT and is significantly better than FIFO. Thus, the answer to our basic question - whether the bulk of recent research on datacenter congestion control algorithms is needed for the common case - is no.","PeriodicalId":403234,"journal":{"name":"Comput. Commun. Rev.","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133618365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sizing router buffers (redux)","authors":"N. McKeown, G. Appenzeller, I. Keslassy","doi":"10.1145/3371934.3371957","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3371934.3371957","url":null,"abstract":"The queueing delay faced by a packet is arguably the largest source of uncertainty during its journey. It therefore seems crucial that we understand how big the buffers should be in Internet routers. Our 2004 Sigcomm paper revisited the existing rule of thumb that a buffer should hold one bandwidth-delay product of packets. We claimed that for long-lived TCP flows, it could be reduced by √N, where N is the number of active flows, potentially reducing the required buffers by well over 90% in Internet backbone routers. One might reasonably expect that such a result, which supports cheaper routers with smaller buffers, would be embraced by the ISP community. In this paper we revisit the result 15 years later, and explain where it has succeeded and failed to affect how buffers are sized.","PeriodicalId":403234,"journal":{"name":"Comput. Commun. Rev.","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121896192","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"It's not about the internet","authors":"L. Chapin","doi":"10.1145/3371934.3371937","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3371934.3371937","url":null,"abstract":"In the policy realm what we call \"Internet issues\" are not actually \"Internet\" issues-they are well-pedigreed social, political, cultural, and economic issues, for which we clever technologists have provided a rich new environment in which to grow and multiply. It follows that the people best prepared to tackle \"Internet\" issues may be thoughtful professionals in fields such as behavioral psychology, linguistics, sociology, education, history, ethnology, and political science-not (exclusively) \"Internet experts\".","PeriodicalId":403234,"journal":{"name":"Comput. Commun. Rev.","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121921254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}