acm sigcomm

Online social networks (OSNs) are immensely popular, with some claiming over 200 million users [10]. Users share private content, such as personal information or photographs, using OSN applications. Users must trust the OSN service to protect personal information even as the OSN provider benefits from examining and sharing that information.

Internet topology discovery consists of inferring the inter-router connectivity (“links”) and the mapping from IP addresses to routers (“alias resolution”). Current topology discovery techniques use TTL-limited “traceroute” probes to discover links and use direct router probing to resolve aliases. The often-ignored record route (RR) IP option provides a source of disparate topology data that could augment existing techniques, but it is difficult to properly align with traceroute-based topologies because router RR implementations are under-standardized.

Incentives play a crucial role in BitTorrent, motivating users to upload to others to achieve fast download times for all peers. Though long believed to be robust to strategic manipulation, recent work has empirically shown that BitTorrent does not provide its users incentive to follow the protocol. We propose an auction-based model to study and improve upon BitTorrent’s incentives. The insight behind our model is that BitTorrent uses, not tit-for-tat as widely believed, but an auction to decide which peers to serve.

Sally Floyd wins 2007 SIGCOMM Award

CALL FOR NOMINATIONS: EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, ACM Computer Communications Review (CCR)