NeTS: Small: A Principled Approach to Enabling Policy Transparency for Mobile Networks

Northeastern University, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

The rise in popularity of bandwidth-hungry applications such as video streaming, and the popularity of resource-constrained mobile networks has reignited discussions about how network traffic associated with different applications is treated by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). To manage scarce network resources, ISPs use middleboxes to selectively enforce network policies (e.g., limit transfer rates for video streaming). This study will explore the impact of middleboxes on network traffic, and lead network users, policymakers, and regulators to a deeper understanding of policies deployed in operational networks. This project addresses three key challenges that limit researchers' understanding of network policies imposed by middleboxes. First, researchers struggle to characterize policies because they have limited or no access to middleboxes for experimentation. Second, researchers lack models of how middleboxes classify and interact with network traffic, making it difficult to reason about them. Finally, identifying and understanding middlebox behavior often requires measurements from vantage points inside the network. This investigation entails black-box and grey-box experiments on commercial middleboxes to build accurate models of how they operate, and using these observations to build a scalable, flexible and realistic testbed for evaluating methods to detect and isolate network policies. This project will incorporate trace-based analysis to design efficient, resilient algorithms to detect these properties from end systems, and optimizations to make this detection system scale. To generalize our results, the PIs will develop a theory of how middleboxes can impact traffic, how to detect these middleboxes from endpoints, potentially with limited visibility into the network.