UC Riverside

The demand for bandwidth is elevating in today’s networks. However, security threats and attacks are increasing as well. We study how to maximize throughput and maintain secu- rity in (I) wireless and (II) wired communication networks. For throughput maximization, (I) we investigate the cases where applying Network Coding (NC) in a careless manner, could cause significant throughput degradation in multi-rate environments. Via extensive experiments and an analysis, we characterize the regimes where NC offers throughput ben- efits and those where it does not. We design PACE, a policy-aware coding enforcement logic, which allows a router to switch between NC and store-and-forward modes depending on link qualities. Our evaluations show that PACE could potentially offer network-wide throughput improvements of up to 350%. (II) we propose a standards agnostic framework BOLT, that helps realize the throughput potential of Power Line Communication (PLC) to serve as a viable backhaul for local network connectivity. The design of BOLT is based on a comprehensive measurement study that provides many insights with regards to PLC net- work characteristics and dynamics. We implement BOLT on three different testbeds using off-the-shelf PLC adapters and showcase its ability to effectively manage flows, delivering several folds throughput improvement over state-of-the-art solutions.

To maintain security, (I) We propose JIMS, a jamming interference mitigation scheme, using which, transceivers can identify subcarriers that are relatively unaffected by jamming and utilize them for communications. Prior approaches can only alleviate jamming interference to a limited extent; they are especially vulnerable to a reactive jammer, i.e., a jammer that injects noise upon sensing a legitimate transmission or wideband jamming.

We show that JIMS restores throughput up to 75% on our WARP testbed. (II) We study VM migration as an effective countermeasure against an attempt at malicious co-residency. We first undertake an experimental study on Amazon EC2 to obtain an in-depth understanding of the side-channels attack. Here, we identify a new set of stealthy side-channel attacks and show that migration limits the co-residency time with a victim VM to about 1% of the time with bandwidth costs of a few MB.