KEYNOTE PRESENTATION


Marco Mellia: Internet measurements: collect, analyse, extract value - The experience from mPlane.

            

He is an associate professor at the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications at Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy. Marco's research interests are in the design and investigation of energy efficient networks (green networks) and in traffic monitoring and analysis. He was the coordinator of the mPlane Integrated Project (an Intelligent Measurement Plane for Future Network and Application Management). Marco has co-authored over 200 research papers published in international journals and presented in leading international conferences, all of them in the area of telecommunication networks. He was awarded the IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize in 2013, and the best paper award at ACM CoNEXT 2013, IEEE TRAC 2015, IEEE ICDCS 2015 and ITC 2015. He is Area Editor of ACM CCR. He also holds 7 patents.

Abstract. Unveiling network and service performance issues in complex and highly decentralized systems such as the Internet is a major challenge. Indeed, the Internet is based on decentralization and diversity and its distributed nature leads to operational brittleness and difficulty in identifying the root causes of performance degradation. In such a context, network measurements are a fundamental pillar to shed light and to unveil design and implementation defects. To tackle this fragmentation and visibility problem, we have recently conceived mPlane, a distributed measurement platform which runs, collects and analyses traffic measurements to study the operation and functioning of the Internet. The potentiality of the mPlane approach to unveil network and service degradation issues in live and operational networks are discussed. In particular, we combine active and passive measurements to troubleshoot problems in end-customer Internet access connections, or to automatically detect and diagnose anomalies in Internet-scale services (e.g., YouTube) which impact a large number of end-users. By means of data mining and big data techniques, potentials to unveil and discover how CDNs work, how to discover malicious traffic, or to understand how web services can track users' activity when online are discussed.