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Mike Wittie

Montana State University - Bozeman, Computer Science, Faculty Member

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Matteo Varvello

Université de Liège

Solomon Gebreselassie

University of Oslo

Christoph Paasch

UCLouvain (University of Louvain)

University of Michigan

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Papers by Mike Wittie

Detecting Cellular Middleboxes using Passive Measurement Techniques

by Utkarsh Goel, Martin Flack, and Mike Wittie

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) follows the end-to-end principle – when a client establis... more The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) follows the end-to-end principle – when a client establishes a connection with a server, the connection is only shared by two physical machines, the client and the server. In current cellular networks, a myriad of middleboxes disregard the end-to-end principle to enable network operators to deploy services such as content caching, compression, and protocol optimization to improve end-to-end network performance. If server operators remain unaware of such middleboxes, TCP connections may not be optimized specifically for middleboxes and instead are optimized for mobile devices. We argue that without costly active measurement, it remains challenging for server operators to reliably detect the presence of middleboxes that split TCP connections. In this paper, we present three techniques (based on latency, loss, and characteristics of TCP SYN packets) for server operators to passively identify Connection Terminating Proxies (CTPs) in cellular networks, with the goal to optimize TCP connections for faster content delivery. Using TCP and HTTP logs recorded by Content Delivery Network (CDN) servers, we demonstrate that our passive techniques are as reliable and accurate as active techniques in detecting CTPs deployed in cellular networks worldwide.

AirLab: Distributed Infrastructure for Wireless Measurements (poster)

Experimental Evaluation of Apple Siri and Google Speech Recognition

We perform an experimental evaluation of two popular cloud-based speech recognition systems. Clou... more We perform an experimental evaluation of two popular cloud-based speech recognition systems. Cloudbased speech recognition systems enhances Web surfing, transportation, health care, etc. Using voice commands helps drivers stay connected to the Internet by avoiding traffic safety risks. The performance of these type of applications should be robust under difficult network conditions. User frustration with network traffic problems can affect the usability of these applications. We evaluate the performance of two popular cloud-based speech recognition applications, Apple Siri and Google Speech Recognition (GSR) under various network conditions. We evaluate transcription delay and accuracy of transcription of each application under different packet loss and jitter values. Results of our study show that performance of cloud-based speech recognition systems can be affected by jitter and packet loss; which are commonly occurring over WiFi and cellular network connections.

Faster Web through Client-Assisted CDN Server Selection

2015 24th International Conference on Computer Communication and Networks (ICCCN), 2015

pcp: Internet Latency Estimation Using CDN Replicas

by Mike Wittie and Hanlu Ye

Survey on Challenges and Solutions to Application Responsiveness in Cellular Networks

Impact of Network Performance on Cloud Speech Recognition

by Mehdi Assefi, Mike Wittie, and Allan Knight

Interactive real-time communication between people and machine enables innovations in transportat... more Interactive real-time communication between people and machine enables innovations in transportation, health care, etc. Using voice or gesture commands improves usability and broad public appeal of such systems. In this paper we experimentally evaluate Google speech recognition and Apple Siritwo of the most popular cloud-based speech recognition systems. Our goal is to evaluate the performance of these systems under different network conditions in terms of command recognition accuracy and round trip delay -two metrics that affect interactive application usability. Our results show that speech recognition systems are affected by loss and jitter, commonly present in cellular and WiFi networks. Finally, we propose and evaluate a network coding transport solution to improve the quality of voice transmission to cloud-based speech recognition systems. Experiments show that our approach improves the accuracy and delay of cloud speech recognizers under different loss and jitter values.

Faster Web through Client-side DNS Redirection

Survey of End-to-End Mobile Network Measurement Testbeds

by Mike Wittie and Utkarsh Goel

Mobile (cellular) networks enable innovation, but can also stifle it and lead to user frustration... more Mobile (cellular) networks enable innovation, but can also stifle it and lead to user frustration when network performance falls below expectations. As mobile networks become the predominant method of Internet access, research, development, and regulatory communities have taken an increased interest in measuring mobile network performance and its impact on user experience. In this survey we examine current approaches to end-to-end mobile network performance measurement, diagnosis, and application prototyping. We compare available tools and their shortcomings with respect to the needs of researchers, developers, regulators, and the public. We intend for this survey to provide a comprehensive view of currently active efforts and some auspicious directions for future work in mobile network measurement and mobile application performance evaluation.

Uncovering the Mystery of Trust in An Online Social Network

by Qing Yang, Mike Wittie, and Luke Liu

ParaNets: A Parallel Network Architecture for Challenged Networks

Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, 2009

Networks characterized by challenges, such as intermit- tent connectivity, network heterogeneity,... more Networks characterized by challenges, such as intermit- tent connectivity, network heterogeneity, and large delays, are called "challenged networks". We propose a novel net- work architecture for challenged networks dubbed Parallel Networks, or, ParaNets. The vision behind ParaNets is to have challenged network protocols operate over multiple heterogenous networks, simultaneously available, through one or more devices. We present the ParaNets archi-

Cascading Impact of Lag on User Experience in Cooperative Multiplayer Games

by Eben Howard, Mike Wittie, Steven Swinford, and Clint Cooper

IP2DC: Making Sense of Replica Selection Tools

Cascading Impact of Lag on User Experience in Multiplayer Games

by Mike Wittie, Eben Howard, and Clint Cooper

MITATE: Mobile Internet Testbed for Application Traffic Experimentation

by Mike Wittie and Ajay Miyyapuram

Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, 2014

ABSTRACT This paper introduces a Mobile Internet Testbed for Application Traffic Experimentation ... more ABSTRACT This paper introduces a Mobile Internet Testbed for Application Traffic Experimentation (MITATE). MITATE is the first programmable testbed to support the prototyping of application communications between mobiles and cloud datacenters. We describe novel solutions to device security and resource sharing behind MITATE. Finally, we show how MITATE can answer network performance questions crucial to mobile application design.

Assessment of multi-hop interpersonal trust in social networks by Three-Valued Subjective Logic

by Mike Wittie, Luke Liu, and Guangchi Liu

IEEE INFOCOM 2014 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, 2014

Assessing multi-hop interpersonal trust in online social networks (OSNs) is critical for many soc... more Assessing multi-hop interpersonal trust in online social networks (OSNs) is critical for many social network applications such as online marketing but challenging due to the difficulties of handling complex OSNs topology, in existing models such as subjective logic, and the lack of effective validation methods. To address these challenges, we for the first time properly define trust propagation and combination in arbitrary OSN topologies by proposing 3VSL (Three-Valued Subjective Logic). The 3VSL distinguishes the posteriori and priori uncertainties existing in trust, and the difference between distorting and original opinions, thus be able to compute multi-hop trusts in arbitrary graphs. We theoretically proved the capability based on the Dirichlet distribution. Furthermore, an online survey system is implemented to collect interpersonal trust data and validate the correctness and accuracy of 3VSL in real world. Both experimental and numerical results show that 3VSL is accurate in computing interpersonal trust in OSNs.

The 6th Workshop on Active Internet Measurements (AIMS-6) Report

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2014

Internet Service in Developing Regions Through Network Coding

by Mike Wittie and Ivica Rimac

2009 6th Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks, 2009

The availability of Internet services brings many benefits to developing regions, yet Internet de... more The availability of Internet services brings many benefits to developing regions, yet Internet deployment levels in these regions remain staggeringly low. In this work we investigate how existing cellular deployments, which have enjoyed more rapid and wider deployment than client Internet infrastructure, could be used to provide very low cost Internet services in underdeveloped rural areas. We propose a new service model in which traffic is delivered over multihop client-to-client connections that are coordinated by end-to-end control traffic exchanged over cellular infrastructure. To enable this scheme in low client density rural settings, we propose a novel data forwarding mechanism for opportunistic space-time paths. To explore multiple opportunistic paths, but without the high forwarding cost of replicating data on these paths, we use network coding and send only a fraction of the data on each path. Through extensive OPNET simulations we show that globally coordinated opportunistic forwarding enables service acceptable to most applications at only a fraction of cellular infrastructure load. We argue that the reduced load on the cellular infrastructure allows additional users to share services and cost of the network and has the potential to lower the per user price of data services in developing regions.

Exploiting locality of interest in online social networks

Proceedings of the 6th International COnference on - Co-NEXT '10, 2010

Online Social Networks (OSN) are fun, popular, and socially significant. An integral part of thei... more Online Social Networks (OSN) are fun, popular, and socially significant. An integral part of their success is the immense size of their global user base. To provide a consistent service to all users, Facebook, the world's largest OSN, is heavily dependent on centralized U.S. data centers, which renders service outside of the U.S. sluggish and wasteful of Internet bandwidth. In this paper, we investigate the detailed causes of these two problems and identify mitigation opportunities. Because details of Facebook's service remain proprietary, we treat the OSN as a black box and reverse engineer its operation from publicly available traces. We find that contrary to current wisdom, OSN state is amenable to partitioning and that its fine grained distribution and processing can significantly improve performance without loss in service consistency. Through simulations of reconstructed Facebook traffic over measured Internet paths, we show that user requests can be processed 79% faster and use 91% less bandwidth. We conclude that the partitioning of OSN state is an attractive scaling strategy for Facebook and other OSN services.

Network optimization with dynamic demands and link prices

2012 50th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton), 2012

We present Overlapping Cluster Decomposition (OCD), a novel distributed algorithm for network opt... more We present Overlapping Cluster Decomposition (OCD), a novel distributed algorithm for network optimization targeted for networks with dynamic demands and link prices. OCD uses a dual decomposition of the global problem into local optimization problems in each node's neighborhood. The local solutions are then reconciled to find the global optimal solution. While OCD is a descent method and thus may converge slowly in a static network, we show that OCD can more rapidly adapt to changing network conditions than previously proposed firstorder and Newton-like network optimization algorithms. Therefore, OCD yields better solutions over time than previously proposed methods at a comparable communication cost.

Detecting Cellular Middleboxes using Passive Measurement Techniques

by Utkarsh Goel, Martin Flack, and Mike Wittie

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) follows the end-to-end principle – when a client establis... more The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) follows the end-to-end principle – when a client establishes a connection with a server, the connection is only shared by two physical machines, the client and the server. In current cellular networks, a myriad of middleboxes disregard the end-to-end principle to enable network operators to deploy services such as content caching, compression, and protocol optimization to improve end-to-end network performance. If server operators remain unaware of such middleboxes, TCP connections may not be optimized specifically for middleboxes and instead are optimized for mobile devices. We argue that without costly active measurement, it remains challenging for server operators to reliably detect the presence of middleboxes that split TCP connections. In this paper, we present three techniques (based on latency, loss, and characteristics of TCP SYN packets) for server operators to passively identify Connection Terminating Proxies (CTPs) in cellular networks, with the goal to optimize TCP connections for faster content delivery. Using TCP and HTTP logs recorded by Content Delivery Network (CDN) servers, we demonstrate that our passive techniques are as reliable and accurate as active techniques in detecting CTPs deployed in cellular networks worldwide.

AirLab: Distributed Infrastructure for Wireless Measurements (poster)

Experimental Evaluation of Apple Siri and Google Speech Recognition

We perform an experimental evaluation of two popular cloud-based speech recognition systems. Clou... more We perform an experimental evaluation of two popular cloud-based speech recognition systems. Cloudbased speech recognition systems enhances Web surfing, transportation, health care, etc. Using voice commands helps drivers stay connected to the Internet by avoiding traffic safety risks. The performance of these type of applications should be robust under difficult network conditions. User frustration with network traffic problems can affect the usability of these applications. We evaluate the performance of two popular cloud-based speech recognition applications, Apple Siri and Google Speech Recognition (GSR) under various network conditions. We evaluate transcription delay and accuracy of transcription of each application under different packet loss and jitter values. Results of our study show that performance of cloud-based speech recognition systems can be affected by jitter and packet loss; which are commonly occurring over WiFi and cellular network connections.

Faster Web through Client-Assisted CDN Server Selection

2015 24th International Conference on Computer Communication and Networks (ICCCN), 2015

pcp: Internet Latency Estimation Using CDN Replicas

by Mike Wittie and Hanlu Ye

Survey on Challenges and Solutions to Application Responsiveness in Cellular Networks

Impact of Network Performance on Cloud Speech Recognition

by Mehdi Assefi, Mike Wittie, and Allan Knight

Interactive real-time communication between people and machine enables innovations in transportat... more Interactive real-time communication between people and machine enables innovations in transportation, health care, etc. Using voice or gesture commands improves usability and broad public appeal of such systems. In this paper we experimentally evaluate Google speech recognition and Apple Siritwo of the most popular cloud-based speech recognition systems. Our goal is to evaluate the performance of these systems under different network conditions in terms of command recognition accuracy and round trip delay -two metrics that affect interactive application usability. Our results show that speech recognition systems are affected by loss and jitter, commonly present in cellular and WiFi networks. Finally, we propose and evaluate a network coding transport solution to improve the quality of voice transmission to cloud-based speech recognition systems. Experiments show that our approach improves the accuracy and delay of cloud speech recognizers under different loss and jitter values.

Faster Web through Client-side DNS Redirection

Survey of End-to-End Mobile Network Measurement Testbeds

by Mike Wittie and Utkarsh Goel

Mobile (cellular) networks enable innovation, but can also stifle it and lead to user frustration... more Mobile (cellular) networks enable innovation, but can also stifle it and lead to user frustration when network performance falls below expectations. As mobile networks become the predominant method of Internet access, research, development, and regulatory communities have taken an increased interest in measuring mobile network performance and its impact on user experience. In this survey we examine current approaches to end-to-end mobile network performance measurement, diagnosis, and application prototyping. We compare available tools and their shortcomings with respect to the needs of researchers, developers, regulators, and the public. We intend for this survey to provide a comprehensive view of currently active efforts and some auspicious directions for future work in mobile network measurement and mobile application performance evaluation.

Uncovering the Mystery of Trust in An Online Social Network

by Qing Yang, Mike Wittie, and Luke Liu

ParaNets: A Parallel Network Architecture for Challenged Networks

Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, 2009

Networks characterized by challenges, such as intermit- tent connectivity, network heterogeneity,... more Networks characterized by challenges, such as intermit- tent connectivity, network heterogeneity, and large delays, are called "challenged networks". We propose a novel net- work architecture for challenged networks dubbed Parallel Networks, or, ParaNets. The vision behind ParaNets is to have challenged network protocols operate over multiple heterogenous networks, simultaneously available, through one or more devices. We present the ParaNets archi-

Cascading Impact of Lag on User Experience in Cooperative Multiplayer Games

by Eben Howard, Mike Wittie, Steven Swinford, and Clint Cooper

IP2DC: Making Sense of Replica Selection Tools

Cascading Impact of Lag on User Experience in Multiplayer Games

by Mike Wittie, Eben Howard, and Clint Cooper

MITATE: Mobile Internet Testbed for Application Traffic Experimentation

by Mike Wittie and Ajay Miyyapuram

Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, 2014

ABSTRACT This paper introduces a Mobile Internet Testbed for Application Traffic Experimentation ... more ABSTRACT This paper introduces a Mobile Internet Testbed for Application Traffic Experimentation (MITATE). MITATE is the first programmable testbed to support the prototyping of application communications between mobiles and cloud datacenters. We describe novel solutions to device security and resource sharing behind MITATE. Finally, we show how MITATE can answer network performance questions crucial to mobile application design.

Assessment of multi-hop interpersonal trust in social networks by Three-Valued Subjective Logic

by Mike Wittie, Luke Liu, and Guangchi Liu

IEEE INFOCOM 2014 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, 2014

Assessing multi-hop interpersonal trust in online social networks (OSNs) is critical for many soc... more Assessing multi-hop interpersonal trust in online social networks (OSNs) is critical for many social network applications such as online marketing but challenging due to the difficulties of handling complex OSNs topology, in existing models such as subjective logic, and the lack of effective validation methods. To address these challenges, we for the first time properly define trust propagation and combination in arbitrary OSN topologies by proposing 3VSL (Three-Valued Subjective Logic). The 3VSL distinguishes the posteriori and priori uncertainties existing in trust, and the difference between distorting and original opinions, thus be able to compute multi-hop trusts in arbitrary graphs. We theoretically proved the capability based on the Dirichlet distribution. Furthermore, an online survey system is implemented to collect interpersonal trust data and validate the correctness and accuracy of 3VSL in real world. Both experimental and numerical results show that 3VSL is accurate in computing interpersonal trust in OSNs.

The 6th Workshop on Active Internet Measurements (AIMS-6) Report

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2014

Internet Service in Developing Regions Through Network Coding

by Mike Wittie and Ivica Rimac

2009 6th Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks, 2009

The availability of Internet services brings many benefits to developing regions, yet Internet de... more The availability of Internet services brings many benefits to developing regions, yet Internet deployment levels in these regions remain staggeringly low. In this work we investigate how existing cellular deployments, which have enjoyed more rapid and wider deployment than client Internet infrastructure, could be used to provide very low cost Internet services in underdeveloped rural areas. We propose a new service model in which traffic is delivered over multihop client-to-client connections that are coordinated by end-to-end control traffic exchanged over cellular infrastructure. To enable this scheme in low client density rural settings, we propose a novel data forwarding mechanism for opportunistic space-time paths. To explore multiple opportunistic paths, but without the high forwarding cost of replicating data on these paths, we use network coding and send only a fraction of the data on each path. Through extensive OPNET simulations we show that globally coordinated opportunistic forwarding enables service acceptable to most applications at only a fraction of cellular infrastructure load. We argue that the reduced load on the cellular infrastructure allows additional users to share services and cost of the network and has the potential to lower the per user price of data services in developing regions.

Exploiting locality of interest in online social networks

Proceedings of the 6th International COnference on - Co-NEXT '10, 2010

Online Social Networks (OSN) are fun, popular, and socially significant. An integral part of thei... more Online Social Networks (OSN) are fun, popular, and socially significant. An integral part of their success is the immense size of their global user base. To provide a consistent service to all users, Facebook, the world's largest OSN, is heavily dependent on centralized U.S. data centers, which renders service outside of the U.S. sluggish and wasteful of Internet bandwidth. In this paper, we investigate the detailed causes of these two problems and identify mitigation opportunities. Because details of Facebook's service remain proprietary, we treat the OSN as a black box and reverse engineer its operation from publicly available traces. We find that contrary to current wisdom, OSN state is amenable to partitioning and that its fine grained distribution and processing can significantly improve performance without loss in service consistency. Through simulations of reconstructed Facebook traffic over measured Internet paths, we show that user requests can be processed 79% faster and use 91% less bandwidth. We conclude that the partitioning of OSN state is an attractive scaling strategy for Facebook and other OSN services.

Network optimization with dynamic demands and link prices

2012 50th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton), 2012

We present Overlapping Cluster Decomposition (OCD), a novel distributed algorithm for network opt... more We present Overlapping Cluster Decomposition (OCD), a novel distributed algorithm for network optimization targeted for networks with dynamic demands and link prices. OCD uses a dual decomposition of the global problem into local optimization problems in each node's neighborhood. The local solutions are then reconciled to find the global optimal solution. While OCD is a descent method and thus may converge slowly in a static network, we show that OCD can more rapidly adapt to changing network conditions than previously proposed firstorder and Newton-like network optimization algorithms. Therefore, OCD yields better solutions over time than previously proposed methods at a comparable communication cost.