BBR: Congestion-Based Congestion Control
When bottleneck buffers are large, loss-based congestion control keeps them full, causing bufferbloat. When bottleneck buffers are small, loss-based congestion control misinterprets loss as a signal of...
View ArticleResearch for Practice: Distributed Transactions and Networks as Physical Sensors
First, Irene Zhang delivers a whirlwind tour of recent developments in distributed concurrency control. If you thought distributed transactions were prohibitively expensive, Irene's selections may...
View ArticleAre You Load Balancing Wrong?
A reader contacted me recently to ask if it is better to use a load balancer to add capacity or to make a service more resilient to failure. The answer is: both are appropriate uses of a load balancer....
View ArticleTime, but Faster
The first premise was summed up perfectly by the late Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." The concept of time, when colliding with...
View ArticleCold, Hard Cache
Dear KV, Our latest project at work requires a large number of slightly different software stacks to deploy within our cloud infrastructure. With modern hardware, I can test this deployment on a...
View ArticleCache Me If You Can
The world is more connected than it ever has been before, and with our pocket supercomputers and IoT (Internet of Things) future, the next generation of the web might just be delivered in a...
View ArticleNetwork Applications Are Interactive
The miniaturization of devices and the prolific interconnectedness of these devices over high-speed wireless networks is completely changing how commerce is conducted. These changes (a.k.a. digital)...
View ArticlePrivate Online Communication; Highlights in Systems Verification
First, Albert Kwon provides an overview of recent systems for secure and private communication. While messaging protocols such as Signal provide privacy guarantees, Albert's selected research papers...
View ArticleBitcoin's Underlying Incentives
Incentives are crucial for the Bitcoin protocol's security and effectively drive its daily operation. Miners go to extreme lengths to maximize their revenue and often find creative ways to do so that...
View ArticleToward a Network of Connected Things
While the scale of data presents new avenues for improvement, the key challenges for the everyday adoption of IoT systems revolve around managing this data. First, we need to consider where the data is...
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