It is our pleasure to welcome you to the Workshop on Measurements Up the Stack (W-MUST), which is co-located with SIGCOMM 2011. W-MUST features position papers on Internet measurement that focus on the behavior of networked applications and user perceptions of Internet services.
Since this is the first W-MUST it is natural to ask why we organized this workshop, and what we hope to achieve by it. We organized W-MUST because of trends we noted in Internet measurement research. Unlike classic measurement techniques that use packet traces to understand network properties, a growing body of Internet measurement struggles to understand the behavior of networked applications. This work benefits from application-level measurements taken on end-hosts because network-level packet traces often see only a portion of what constitutes an application. And by working "up the stack" this work inevitably runs into the challenges of user-facing research. These challenges include gathering data on how users exercise networked applications, assessing how well they perceive the applications to work, and encouraging users to contribute measurements taken from their end-host.
It is our hope that W-MUST brings together researchers across the disciplines of networking and HCI to discuss research at their intersection. By doing so we intend to nurture new lines of research in the community to tackle the challenges above, and to deepen our understanding of the applications and users that make use of the network. Such a multi-disciplinary approach could foster the development of techniques for data collection "up the stack", and for labeling, correlating and predicting data across the network, application and user layers. Moreover, a multi-disciplinary approach could lead to interesting solutions for problems such as performance diagnosis, security and privacy, personalized computing, and keeping users informed on performance issues that matter to them.
Proceeding Downloads
The network from above and below
Recently, the HCI community has taken a strong interest in problems associated with networking. Many of those problems have also been the focus of much recent networking research, e.g., traffic identification, network management, access control. In this ...
Studying the experience of mobile applications used in different contexts of daily life
Mobile applications and services increasingly assist us in our daily life situations, fulfilling our needs for information, communication, entertainment or leisure. However, user acceptance of a mobile application depends on at least two conditions; the ...
Large-scale app-based reporting of customer problems in cellular networks: potential and limitations
- Yu Jin,
- Nick Duffield,
- Alexandre Gerber,
- Patrick Haffner,
- Wen-Ling Hsu,
- Guy Jacobson,
- Subhabrata Sen,
- Shobha Venkataraman,
- Zhi-Li Zhang
In this paper, we study the Location-based Reporting Tool (LRT), a smartphone application for collecting large-scale feedback from mobile customers. Using one-year data collected from one of the largest cellular networks in the US, we compare LRT ...
Vienna surfing: assessing mobile broadband quality in the field
This paper presents our findings from a mobile broadband QoE field trial conducted in the city of Vienna, Austria. Using their own laptops in everyday contexts, participants regularly assessed the quality of their mobile broadband connection (tasks: web ...
Experiences from Netalyzr with engaging users in end-system measurement
Netalyzr is a widely used network diagnostic and debugging tool that has collected 259,000 measurement sessions to date. To use Netalyzr, users visit its website, download an applet that proceeds to conduct a suite of tests and measurements, and obtain ...
Inferring the QoE of HTTP video streaming from user-viewing activities
HTTP video streaming, employed by most of the video-sharing websites, allows users to control the video playback using, for example, pausing and switching the bit rate. These user-viewing activities can be used to mitigate the temporal structure ...
Performance of networked applications: the challenges in capturing the user's perception
There is much interest recently in doing automated performance diagnosis on user laptops or desktops. One interesting aspect of performance diagnosis that has received little attention is the user perspective on performance. To conduct research on both ...
Understanding end-user perception of network problems
It is widely assumed that certain network characteristics cause end-user irritation with network performance. These assumptions then drive the selection of quality of service parameters or the goals of adaptive systems. We have developed a methodology ...
Identifying performance bottlenecks in CDNs through TCP-level monitoring
Content distribution networks (CDNs) need to make decisions, such as server selection and routing, to improve performance for their clients. The performance may be limited by various factors such as packet loss in the network, a small receive buffer at ...
Measuring and predicting web login safety
Users increasingly entrust websites with their personal and sensitive information. Sites commonly protect this information using user-supplied credentials (i.e., logins). We conducted a measurement study of top websites and surprisingly found that they ...
Crowdsourcing ISP characterization to the network edge
- Zachary S. Bischof,
- John S. Otto,
- Mario A. Sánchez,
- John P. Rula,
- David R. Choffnes,
- Fabián E. Bustamante
Evaluating and characterizing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) is critical to subscribers shopping for alternative ISPs, companies providing reliable Internet services, and governments surveying the coverage of broadband services to its citizens. ...
- Proceedings of the first ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Measurements up the stack