The scalability issues the global routing system has been experienc- ing over the past years have raised serious concerns in the Internet community. One of the main culprits for the rapidly growing BGP routing table is the defragmentation process of the address blocks allocated to ASes, also known as prefix deaggreation. The Internet is a complex system and understanding its behavioural evolution is certainly a challenging task. For this reason, the use of eco- nomic models can provide intuitive explanations of the complex interactions between networks that result in the aforementioned phenomenon of prefix deaggreation. In this paper, we propose a game theoretic model to analyze the incentives behind the deag- gregating strategies of the networks. Announcing more-specific prefixes in the Internet impacts the size of the global routing table and increases the network operators’ capital expenditure for rout- ing equipment capable of sustaining the growing Internet. How- ever, we prove that the ASes are driven by fundamental economic reasons towards this type of apparently harming behaviour. We find that by announcing more prefixes the originating network achieves a more predictable traffic pattern and reduces the peak levels of bandwidth consumption. We show that this happens because, both in the equilibrium point and the social welfare point, the cost re- duction achieved by smoothing the traffic distribution outweighs the additional cost incurred by the routing table expansion.

In this talk I will briefly overview the research topics I have been working on, as well as describe new topics I recently began looking into. The former includes behavior-based Internet worm detection, Internet routing forensics, IP spoofing prevention, and trusted and incentivized peer-to-peer data sharing between distrusted and selfish clients. The latter includes reliable IP prefix monitoring, active phishing disruption, social networks for access control, security and privacy for homecare rehabilitation environments, and the clean-slate architecture design for future Internet. The purpose of this talk is to provide a glimpse of my fights, so you can weigh which fights you would like to join me to win, or leverage my weapons to help win yours, or even better, we find and beat a common enemy.

The seminar will cover essential aspects of tech-based entrepreneurship, with special regard to ventures in the field of ICTs. Resources for entrepreneurs at UC3M within the Campus del Emprendedor UC3M Programme will be detailed. An inspiring speech by young entrepreneurs from our Business Incubator will stimulate a discussion with attendees.

Since the early nineties, intelligent agents and multiagent systems have been envisioned as the key enabling technologies for the design and implementation of large-scale, open, distributed systems. After two decades, the scientific community is still in quest of the killer application that could unleash the full potential of multiagent systems. In recent years, smart infrastructures, such as intelligent transportation and smart power networks, attracted the interest of the scientific community as two paradigmatic large-scale, open, distributed systems of a great social and economical relevance. In particular the talk will focus on two examples of on-going research on the application of market-based methods for the efficient allocation of urban road networks and coalition formation for the creation of virtual power plants.

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the protocol used among Internet Service Providers to provide IP connectivity among and across their networks. In this course, we will first review the basics of Internet routing with BGP.  

The second Workshop on "far out" research ideas of the institute is to be held on January 19th, 2011. The purpose of the second edition of this series of workshops is to have researchers from the institute present very innovative ideas that could lead to internal projects or even the offspring of a full line of research. The sessions encourage brain-storming around the ideas presented, in order to help give them shape and evaluate their potential.

The first Workshop on "far out" research ideas of the institute is to be held on December 17th, 2010. The purpose of the first edition of this series of workshops is to have researchers from the institute present very innovative ideas that could lead to internal projects or even the offspring of a full line of research. The sessions encourage brain-storming around the ideas presented, in order to help give them shape and evaluate their potential.

  Whereas prefix hijacking is usually examined from security perspectives, this paper looks at it from a novel economic angle. Our study stems from an observation that a transit AS (Autonomous System) has a financial interest in attracting extra traffic to the links with its customers. Based on real data about the actual hijacking incident in the Internet, we conduct simulations in the real AS-level Internet topology with synthetic demands for the hijacked traffic. Then, we measure traffic on all inter-AS links and compute the payments of all providers. The analysis of our results from technical, business, and legal viewpoints suggests that hijacking-based traffic attraction is a viable strategy that can create a fertile ground for tussles between providers. In particular, giant top-tier providers appear to have the strongest financial incentives to hijack popular prefixes and then deliver the intercepted traffic to the proper destinations. We also discuss directions for future research in the area of hijacking-based traffic attraction.  

BitTorrent is the most popular P2P content delivery appli-cation where individual users share various type of content with tens of thousands of other users. The growing popular-ity of BitTorrent is primarily due to the availability of valuable content without any cost for the consumers. However, apart from required resources, publishing (sharing) valuable (and often copyrighted) content has serious legal implica-tions for users who publish the material (or publishers). This raises a question that whether (at least major) content publishers behave in an altruistic fashion or have other incentives such as financial. In this study, we identify the content publishers of more than 55K torrents in two major BitTorrent portals and examine their behavior. We demonstrate that a small fraction of publishers is responsible for 67% of the published content and 75% of the downloads. Our investigations reveal that these major publishers respond to two dif-ferent profiles. On the one hand, antipiracy agencies and ma-licious publishers publish a large amount of fake files to protect copyrighted content and spread malware respectively. On the other hand, content publishing in BitTorrent is largely driven by companies with financial incentives. Therefore, if these companies lose their interest or are unable to publish content, BitTorrent traffic/portals may disappear or at least their associated traffic will be significantly reduced.

This talk will introduce P2PSIP (Peer-to-peer Session Initiation Protocol) technologies, including the most common protocols and algorithms. The talk will also discuss the performance of these technologies in different network settings and the tradeoffs associated with deploying P2PSIP systems. Additionally, the talk will cover issues related to security and NAT traversal.