BitTorrent is one of the most popular application in the current Internet. However, we still have little knowledge about the topology of real BitTorrent swarms and how the traffic is actually exchanged among peers. This paper addresses fundamental questions regarding the topology of live BitTorrent swarms. For this purpose we have collected the evolution of the graph topology of 250 real torrents from its birth during a period of 15 days. Using this dataset we first demonstrate that real BitTorrent swarms are neither random graphs nor small world networks.

Fake content represents an important portion of those files shared in BitTorrent. In this paper we conduct a large scale measurement study in order to analyse the fake content publishing phenomenon in the BitTorrent Ecosystem. Our results reveal that a few tens of users are responsible for 90% of the fake content. Furthermore, more than 99% of the analysed fake files are linked to either malware or scam websites. This creates a serious thread for the BitTorrent ecosystem.

Twitter is one of the most used applications in the current Internet with more than 200M accounts created so far. As other large-scale systems Twitter can obtain benefit by exploiting the Locality effect existing among its users. In this paper we perform the first comprehensive study of the Locality effect of Twitter. For this purpose we have collected the geographical location of around 1M Twitter users and 16M of their followers. Our results demonstrate that language and cultural characteristics determine the level of Locality expected for different countries.

Inter-domain traffic engineering is an important aspect of network operation both technically and economically. Traffic engineering the outbound direction is less problematic as routers under the control of the network operator are responsible for the way traffic leaves the network. The inbound direction is considerably harder as the way traffic enters a network is based on routing decisions in other networks.

Sleep modes are emerging as a promising technique for energy-efficient networking: by adequately putting to sleep and waking up network resources according to traffic demands, proportionality between energy consumption and network utilization can be approached, with important reductions in energy consumption. Previous studies have investigated and evaluated sleep modes for wireless access networks, computing variable percentages of energy savings.

Distributed Opportunistic Scheduling (DOS) techniques have been recently proposed to improve the throughput performance of wireless networks. With DOS, each station contends for the channel with a certain access probability. If a contention is successful, the station measures the channel conditions and transmits in case the channel quality is above a certain threshold.

A majority of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) support connectivity to the entire Internet by transiting their traffic via other providers. Although the transit prices per Mbps decline steadily, the overall transit costs of these ISPs remain high or even increase, due to the traffic growth. The discontent of the ISPs with the high transit costs has yielded notable innovations such as peering, content distribution networks, multicast, and peer-to-peer localization.

The injection of artificially fragmented prefixes through BGP is a widely used traffic engineering technique. In this paper we examine one particular economic side-effect of deaggregation, namely the impact on the transit traffic bill. We show that the use of more-specific prefixes has a traffic stabilization side-effect which translates into a decrease of the transit traffic bill. We propose an analytical model in order to quantify the impact of deaggregation on the transit costs. We validate our results by means of simulations and through the extensive analysis of real BGP routing information data.

Rate Allocation for Layered Multicast Streaming with Inter-Layer Network Coding Abstract Multi-layer video streaming allows to provide different video qualities to a group of multicast receivers with heterogeneous receive rates. The number of layers received determines the quality of the decoded video stream. For such layered multicast streaming, network coding provides higher capacity than multicast routing. Network coding can be performed within a layer (intra-layer) or across layers (inter-layer), and in general inter-layer coding outperforms intra-layer coding.

Dr. Kowalski will present recent advances on contention resolution and packet queuing on a multiple access channel. His will include description of algorithms, both already known and newly developed, accompanied by theoretical analysis of queue sizes and latency. He will conclude with showing and elaborating on selected simulation results that support theoretical formulas.