Applied Network Research Prize presentations at IETF 108

The Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) awards are presented each year for recent results in applied networking research that are relevant to shipping Internet products and related standardization efforts. 

The ANRP program recognizes the best new ideas in networking and provides them with greater visibility within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) communities. 

Three upcoming ANRP presentations by 2020 prize winners are expected to spark discussion among the engineers, network operators, policy makers, and scientists that participate in IETF meetings.

Shehar Bano will present on work to develop a taxonomy of Internet host liveness. Internet-wide scanning depends on how a target IP address responds to a probe packet, but the interpretation of such responses, or lack of them, is nuanced. "Scanning the Internet for Liveness” addresses often-neglected factors that can significantly affect the results of active measurement studies. The resulting taxonomy is leveraged to develop a scanning method that comprehensively captures all responses, including negative and cross-layer responses. Leveraging this methodology, a systematic analysis of liveness and how it manifests in active scanning campaigns yields practical insights and methodological improvements for the design and execution of active Internet measurement studies.

Chaoyi Lu will discuss work on measuring DNS-over-encryption, as presented in the paper, “An End-to-End, Large-Scale Measurement of DNS-over-Encryption: How Far Have We Come?” Analysis of end-to-end and large-scale analysis on DNS-over-Encryption by collecting data from Internet scanning, user-end measurement and passive monitoring logs presented in this paper yields several unique insights. While several operational issues are identified, overall conclusions include that the community should push broader adoption of DNS-over-Encryption while service providers should carefully review their implementations.

Ingmar Poese’s work on traffic engineering will be the topic of a talk titled, "Steering Hyper-Giants' Traffic at Scale”. Large content providers, responsible for sending the majority of the content traffic to consumers, operate highly distributed infrastructures to cope with the ever-increasing demand for online content. To enhance end-user experience, improve reliability, and scale network capacity, these “hyper-giants” are increasingly connecting to consumer networks at multiple locations, posing new challenges for mapping end-user requests to appropriate servers. The Flow Director system enables automated cooperation between one of the largest consumer network and a leading hyper-giant. Empirical data collected over two years of operation finds high compliance of the hyper-giant to the Flow Director's recommendations, resulting in close-to-optimal user-server mapping, and a 15% reduction of the hyper-giant's traffic overhead on ISP long-haul links, benefiting hyper-giants, ISPs, and end-users alike.

The ANRP award talks will be given as part of the IRTF Open Meeting session of the IETF 108 Online meeting at 1100 UTC on 28 July 2020. Registration for the IETF 108 meeting is currently open. A live stream of the session will be available on the IETF YouTube channel. For those interested in more applied networking research, registration for the Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW2020) to be held online from 30-31 July is also open.

The ANRP is supported by the Internet Society and the IRTF, and sponsored by Comcast and NBC Universal.