NeTS: Small: Beating the Odds in Traffic Measurements/Detection with Optimal Online Learning and Adaptive Policies

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A key tool for understanding and engineering Internet backbone is the analysis of packet traces. However, given the increasing backbone speed towards 100Gbps, it is prohibitive to monitor individual flows at all times. This project develops optimal online learning and adaptation strategies for accurate traffic sampling, inference, and detection under hard resource constraints (e.g., limited CPU or memory at routers) and dynamic network/traffic conditions. Based on theories and techniques in multi-arm bandits, group testing, and compressed sensing, optimal or near-optimal solutions will be developed by exploiting the unique structures of the specific measurement application under study. Challenges addressed include learning from observations with heavy-tailed distributions and long-range dependencies, coping with sparse and/or imperfect observations, and distributed learning strategies that involve multiple monitors and decision points.If successful, this research will provide fundamental design principles for a flexible traffic measurement infrastructure under the software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm. Reconfigurable measurements based on a learning process can be realized in commodity router/switches using SDN APIs such as OpenFlow, leading to potential development of new services. As this project examines problems at the intersection of networking and stochastic learning/optimization, it provides interdisciplinary training to graduate and undergraduate students in a team environment.