Mahak

ACM HotNets'23

"Harnessing ML For Network Protocol Assessment: A Congestion Control Use Case"[paper]

In this work, our primary objective is to showcase that the application of machine learning techniques extends beyond network protocol design. We aim to demonstrate that performance assessment of network protocols, a vital aspect of improving network infrastructures and developing better protocol designs, can be modernized through the utilization of machine learning. As a step towards this goal, we have designed and introduced Mahak, the first tool that harnesses active learning techniques to automate the performance assessment of congestion control schemes. Mahak actively learns to optimize the evaluation process of congestion control schemes so that they can generate their performance maps over a desired space without exhaustively testing them in every scenario ...

Sage

ACM SIGCOMM'23

"Computers Can Learn from the Heuristic Designs and Master Internet Congestion Control"
[paper, code, presentation]

For the first time, we demonstrate that computers can automatically learn from observing the heuristic efforts of the last four decades, stand on the shoulders of the existing Internet congestion control (CC) schemes, and discover a better-performing one. To that end, we address many different practical challenges, from how to generalize representation of various existing CC schemes to serious challenges regarding learning from a vast pool of policies in the complex CC domain and introduce Sage. Sage is the first purely data-driven Internet CC design that learns a better scheme by harnessing the existing solutions ...

Internet Congestion Control Benchmarking

arXiv'23

"Internet Congestion Control Benchmarking"[paper, code]

How do we assess a new Internet congestion control (CC) design? How do we compare it with other existing schemes? Under what scenarios and using what network parameters? These are just a handful of simple questions coming up every time a new CC design is going to be evaluated. Interestingly, the number of specific answers to these questions can be as large as the number of CC designers. In this work, we aim to highlight that the network congestion control, as a hot and active research topic, requires a crystal clear set(s) of CC Benchmarks to form a common ground for quantitatively comparing and unambiguously assessing the strengths and weaknesses of a design with respect to the existing ones ...

Reminis

arXiv'23

A Simple Non-Deterministic Approach Can Adapt to Complex Unpredictable 5G Cellular Networks [paper]

5G cellular networks are envisioned to support a wide range of emerging delay-oriented services with different delay requirements (e.g., 20ms for VR/AR, 40ms for cloud gaming, and 100ms for immersive video streaming). However, due to the highly variable and unpredictable nature of 5G access links, existing end-to-end (e2e) congestion control (CC) schemes perform poorly for them. Here, we demonstrate that properly blending non-deterministic exploration techniques with straightforward proactive and reactive measures is sufficient to design a simple yet effective e2e CC scheme for 5G networks that can: (1) achieve high controllable performance, and (2) possess provable properties...

Qanat

IEEE/IFIP NOMS'23

F Zandi, S Abbasizadeh, Soheil Abbasloo, Parsa Pazhooheshy, Y Ganjali, Z Hu
"Live Stateful Migration of a Virtual Sub-Network" [paper]

Traffic processing on cloud-scale bandwidths has given rise to a new type of network structure, comprising a large number of highly-structured virtual entities working in close harmony. This structure, which we call a virtual sub-network, might be in need of migration, for reasons of load-balancing, maintenance, and disaster prevention. In this paper, we argue that the common migration schemes are not adequate for the complexity of this task. Therefore, we present Qanat, a migration system specifically optimized for the live migration of a virtual sub-network in its entirety to a different physical location. We show how Qanat employs widely-used techniques, such as traffic prioritization, buffering, and network tunnels, to overcome the main issues of live migration ...

Switch Migration Scheduling

IEEE NetSoft'22

M Buckley, S Abbasi-Zadeh, MA Beiruti, Soheil Abbasloo, Y Ganjali
"Switch Migration Scheduling in Distributed SDN Controllers" [paper]

Due to the dynamic nature of traffic, networks must rapidly adapt to changing conditions. This is especially true in the context of the control plane which must ensure continuous and seamless operation. Switch migration, the process of changing the controller associated with a switch, is an important tool in facilitating this goal. In this work, we study the problem of minimizing the overall time to migrate a set of switches We examine the problem subject to constraints on controller resources and QoS groups. We show that the problem is NP-hard and provide heuristic algorithms for solving large instances in practice. Through extensive experiments, ...

DeepCC

IEEE JSAC'21

Soheil Abbasloo, CY Yen (co-first author), HJ Chao
"Wanna Make Your TCP Scheme Great for Cellular Networks? Let Machines Do It for You!" [paper, code]

Can we instead of designing yet another new TCP algorithm, design a TCP plug-in that can enable machines to automatically boost the performance of the existing/future TCP designs in cellular networks? We answer this question by introducing DeepCC. DeepCC leverages advanced deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques to let machines automatically learn how to steer throughput-oriented TCP algorithms toward achieving applications' desired delays in a highly dynamic network such as the cellular network. We used DeepCC plug-in to boost the performance of various old and new TCP schemes including TCP Cubic, Google's BBR, TCP Westwood, and TCP Illinois in cellular networks ...

Orca

ACM SIGCOMM'20

Soheil Abbasloo, CY Yen (co-first author), HJ Chao
"Classic Meets Modern: a Pragmatic Learning-Based Congestion Control for the Internet"
[paper, presentation, slides, code]
These days, taking the revolutionary approach of using clean-slate learning-based designs to completely replace the classic congestion control schemes for the Internet is gaining popularity. However, we argue that current clean-slate learning-based techniques bring practical issues and concerns such as overhead, convergence issues, and low performance over unseen network conditions to the table. To address these issues, we take a pragmatic and evolutionary approach combining classic congestion control strategies and advanced modern deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques and introduce a novel hybrid congestion control for the Internet named Orca ...

SharpEdge

CCF Transactions on Networking'20

Soheil Abbasloo, HJ Chao
"SharpEdge: An Asynchronous and Core-Agnostic Solution to Guarantee Bounded-Delays" [paper]

What are the key properties that a network should have to provide bounded-delay guarantees for the packets? In this paper, we attempt to answer this question. To that end, we explore the theory of bounded-delay networks and provide the necessary and the sufficient conditions required to have deterministic bounded-delays in the network. We prove that as long as a network is work-conserving, independent of the packet scheduling and queue management algorithms used in the switches, it is sufficient to shape the traffic properly at the edge of the network to meet hard bounded-delays ...

To Schedule or not to Schedule?!

Computer Networks'20

Soheil Abbasloo, Y Xu, HJ Chao
"To schedule or not to schedule: When no-scheduling can beat the best-known flow scheduling algorithm in datacenter networks" [paper]

Conventional wisdom for minimizing the average flow completion time (AFCT) in the datacenter network (DCN), where flow sizes are highly variable, would suggest scheduling every individual flow. However, we show that considering scheduling delay (including schedulers computational and communication delays), serving most of the flows without any scheduling and only in first-come-first-served (FCFS) manner significantly improves their performance even when it is compared to the shortest remaining processing time (SRPT) known as optimum algorithm ...

Cellular Controller Delay TCP (C2TCP)

IEEE JSAC'19 & IEEE/IFIP Networking'18

Soheil Abbasloo, Y Xu, HJ Chao
"C2TCP: A flexible cellular TCP to meet stringent delay requirements" [paper]

Soheil Abbasloo, T Li, Y Xu, HJ Chao
"Cellular controlled delay TCP (C2TCP)" [paper]

We present C2TCP, a flexible end-to-end solution targeting emergin applications (such as such as virtual reality and vehicle-to-vehicle communications) requiring high throughput and low delay in cellular networks. C2TCP stands on top of loss-based TCP and brings it delay sensitivity without requiring any network state profiling, channel prediction, or complicated rate adjustment mechanisms. The key idea behind C2TCP is to absorb dynamics of unpredictable cellular channels ...

Network Assisted TCP (NATCP)

USENIX HotEdge'19

Soheil Abbasloo, Y Xu, HJ Chao, H Shi, UC Kozat, Y Ye
"Toward Optimal Performance with Network Assisted {TCP} at Mobile Edge" [paper, slides]

In contrast to the classic fashion for designing distributed end-to-end (e2e) TCP schemes for cellular networks (CN), we explore another design space by having the CN assist the task of the transport control. We show that in the emerging cellular architectures such as mobile/multi-access edge computing (MEC), where the servers are located close to the radio access network (RAN), significant improvements can be achieved by leveraging the nature of the logically centralized network measurements at the RAN and passing information such as its minimum e2e delay and access link capacity to each server. Particularly, a Network Assistance module (located at the mobile edge) will pair up with wireless scheduler to provide feedback information to each server and facilitate the task of congestion control ...

BoDe

arXiv'19

Soheil Abbasloo, HJ Chao
"Bounding queue delay in cellular networks to support ultra-low latency applications" [paper]

We investigate the problems of existing AQM schemes and show that they are not suitable options to support ultra-low latency applications in a highly dynamic network such as current and future cellular networks. Moreover, we believe that achieving good performance does not necessarily come from complex drop rate calculation algorithms or complicated AQM techniques. Consequently, we propose BoDe an extremely simple and deployment friendly AQM scheme to bound the queuing delay of served packets and support ultra-low latency applications. We have evaluated BoDe in extensive trace-based evaluations ...

HyLine

IEEE/IFIP Netwokring'18

Soheil Abbasloo, Y Xu, HJ Chao
"Hyline: a Simple and Practical Flow Scheduling for Commodity Datacenters" [paper]

Today's datacenter networks (DCNs) have been built upon multipath topologies where each path contains multiple links. However, flow scheduling schemes proposed to minimize flow completion times (FCT) in DCNs are based on algorithms which are optimum or close-to-optimum only over single link. Moreover, most of these scheduling schemes seek either fully centralized approaches having overhead of communicating to a central entity or fully distributed approaches requiring changes in the fabric.Motivated by these shortcomings, we present HyLine a simple scheduling design for commodity DCNs which is equipped with a joint load-balancing and flow scheduling (path-aware) design exploiting the multipath nature of DCNs ...