ACM Author-Izer Service

ACM Author-Izer service allows authors to share full text of their ACM publications and Bibliometrics through their blogs and websites. A cool feature indeed! I hope IEEE too will follow. I have linked one of my publications below.

Bassa: a time shifted web caching system for developing regions

Wathsala W. Vithanage, Ajantha S. Atukorale
NSDR '11 Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on Networked systems for developing regions, 2011

Bro: An IDS that Can be Used for Collecting Network Traffic Traces

I recently started a project to archive network traffic traces with some fellow researchers from whom I learned about Bro. Bro is an amazing intrusion detection system that has been developed at UC Berkeley based on many years of research done by Prof. Vern Paxson and his team. The interesting thing about Bro is that it could be used for archiving network traffic traces with a high granularity. What this means is unlike utilities like tcpdump Bro is intelligent enough to uniquely identify connections between hosts (TCP/UDP) and application level protocols being used in those connections. As a result Bro logs network level connections, HTTP, SMTP, FTP, SSH, SSL, etc with their protocol data instead of logging raw packet headers.

Another cool feature of Bro is the new extensible logging framework which will be available in up coming version 2.0. A well written document on the extensible logging framework can be found here. Even though Bro was capable of on the fly anonymization of traces in version 1.5 it is broken and will be removed from the next version (version 2.0). According to Bro devs we will have to wait for sometime to see this very useful feature back. Until they come up with the code for it based on Pang R, et al. "A High-level Programming Environment for Packet Trace Anonymization and Transformation" I came up with a workaround that works but far less elegant (More on this in my next blog post). Since logs are anonymized sufficiently we can now carry out our research. Except for issues on trace anonymization  Bro does a fantastic job (However anonymization matters a lot when data is shared between institutions). End of the day all I can say is that Bro is fast, clean and extensible!

A Time Shifted Web Caching System for Developing Regions

I presented the paper titled as "A Time Shifted Web Caching System for Developing regions" at NSDR 2011 held in Washington D.C. on 28th of June 2011.

Bassa presentation

View more presentations from Wathsala Vithanage

A Long Awaited Report on Dalesa

I received a report on Dalesa P2P web cache from Nikhita Dulluri and Shruti Pathak on 8th May 2011. This is one of the long awaited reports on Dalesa. They have performed a performance analysis on Dalesa covering some of the key areas such as latency, number of HTTP/HTTPS packets sent/received, bandwidth saving and memory consumption. Overall it is a very positive review. I thank both Shruti and Nikhita for their valuable contribution.

Got Two Papers Accepted for IEEE - ISCC and ACM NSDR

Two of my most recent papers titled as "A Novel Classifier for Engineering Web Traffic" and "Bassa: A Time Shifted Web Caching System for Developing Regions" were accepted to 16th IEEE Symposium on Computer and Communication (ISCC) in Greece and 5th ACM workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions (NSDR) in Washington D.C respectively. NSDR is an ACM Mobisys 2011 workshop. However publishing at these conferences will depend on travel grants.

ISCC

NSDR

Dalesa Reached an Important Milestone

2nd, November, 2010 was one of the most memorable days for the Dalesa project. On this day for the first time Dalesa was released for Windows family of operating systems after a long overdue. Win32 porting and C# based user interface development began on this highly anticipated release soon after release 1.1.0 was made. Version 1.2.0 of Dalesa runs equally well on Linux, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Seven. You can download binaries for windows and Ubuntu versions from here.

Version 1.2.0 of Dalesa has the same set of features you will find in it's predecessor the version 1.1.0. Only difference is from this release on Dalesa will listen on two network interfaces in parallel. The loopback interface is used for all local browser interactions and wired or wireless interface is used for all peer interactions. The advantage is that users now do not have to change their proxy settings each time they change the listen interface or when DHCP server gives them a different IP address as the loopback IP address (127.0.0.1) is being used. Therefore setting up the browser proxy is a one time task with version 1.2.0.

I believe that first generation of Dalesa software has delivered what it has promised nearly two years ago. The second generation or the 2.x.x releases will use both multicasting and distributed hash tables in peer - to - peer object lookup algorithms. Therefore I hope that version 2.0.0 will be more ambitious and an exciting project for both users and developers of Dalesa.

Finally a big thank goes to all the members of team Dalesa at LSF who were behind Dalesa in various ways since it's inception in 2009.

Virtual Learning Model for Metaverses was Published at ICTer 2010

My second publication at ICTer 2010 was Virtual Learning Model for Metaverses. This paper tries to generalize learning in virtual worlds. You can get the paper from here.

Virtual learning model for metaverses

View more presentations from Wathsala Vithanage.

Real-Time Mobile P2P Video Streaming Overlay was Published at ICTer 2010

This is the presentation of Real-Time Mobile P2P Video Streaming Overlay concept paper which I published at ICTer 2010 conference. I did this presentation on the first day of the conference at Cinnamon Lakeside Colombo. Get paper from here.

P2P Mobile Streaming

View more presentations from Wathsala Vithanage.

Two Papers were Published at ICTer 2010

ICTer 2010 conference was held from 29th October to 1st September at Cinnamon Lakeside, Colombo. I published two papers in this conference titled as Real-time Mobile Peer – to – Peer Video Streaming Overlay and Virtual Learning Model for Metaverses.

I will post the two presentations in two separate blog posts.