Network Neutrality : Neutrality, Search Neutrality, CDNs, Monitoring, statistical tests

Call for expression of interest description

The Marie S. Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (MSCA-PF) programme is a highly prestigious renowned EU-funded scheme. It offers talented scientists a unique chance to set up 2-year research and training projects with the support of a supervising team. Besides providing an attractive grant, it represents a major opportunity to boost the career of promising researchers.  

Research laboratories in Brittany arethus looking for excellent postdoctoral researchers with an international profile to write a persuasive proposal to apply for a Marie S. Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship grant in 2024 (deadline of the EU call set on 11 September 2024). The topic and research team presented below have been identified in this regard.

Main Research Field

• Information Science and Engineering (ENG)

Research sub-field(s)

Networking, Modeling, Statistical tests

Keywords

Network Neutrality, Search Neutrality, CDNs, Monitoring, statistical tests

Research project description

According to network neutrality principles all data packets are supposed to be treated the same at each node of the network, without any distinction of their type, terminal, origin or destination. Our goal is to develop measurement tools allowing to detect if a non-neutral behavior can be highlighted, this for the various actors of the Internet network: network access providers first, the main target of the network neutrality debate, but not only. Indeed, a packet-focused neutrality can be circumvented by applying a service differentiation at another level: it could for example be the case by choosing the data cached at the edge of the network to provide a better quality of service, or even at the search engine level. An implicit goal will then be to define a neutral (or fair) behavior for each actor, to define the associated metrics, and to set up corresponding measurement techniques.

The Postdoctoral fellow will work on designing tests of neutrality infringements, with a particular interest for video streaming. The goal is to develop rigorous methodologies to analyze if a traffic is manipulated by an ISP. Strong mathematical grounds with clear and transparent methods are required if we want the methods to be later used to enforce compliance with the rules: up to now, the existing methods have been based on heuristics. While existing tests comparing a differentiated and non-differentiated traffic are based on heuristics, they could be invalidated if used for example by experts in court. One of the difficulties for not applying standard and known statistical tests properly is because of the non-independence of data. For example, thanks to so-called batching techniques used in simulation for output analysis of stochastics processes.

Some references:

• P. Maillé and B. Tuffin, From Net Neutrality to ICT neutrality. Springer, 2022.
• A. Molavi Kakhki, A. Razaghpanah, A. Li, H. Koo, R. Golani, D. Choffnes, P. Gill, and A. Mislove, “Identifying Traffic Differentiation in Mobile Networks,” Proceedings of the 2015 Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 239–251, October 2015.
• T. Garrett, L. E. Setenareski, L. M. Peres, L. C. E. Bona, and E. P. Duarte, “Monitoring network neutrality: A survey on traffic differentiation detection,” IEEE Communications Surveys Tutorials, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 2486–2517, 2018.

Supervisor(s)

The Postdoctoral Fellow will be supervised by Bruno Tuffin at the ERMINE team of the Inria Centre. He is Senior Researcher at Inria and head of the ERMINE team. His research interests include telecommunication-related economic models. He also holds a strong expertise in statistics, his second research activity (his PhD thesis was on Monte Carlo simulation) which will be helpful to design rigorous statistical tests of neutrality infringements. Overall, he has published close to two hundred papers among which the amount listed above on network neutrality issues. He has also led or participated into several French and European projects on network economics (including leading an ANR project called CAPTURES on the analysis of competition between providers), and co-

organized several conferences. He is currently or was Area and Associate Editor for four different journals. He has written or co-written several books among which the following two related to the project: Telecommunication Network Economics: From Theory to Applications published by Cambridge University Press in 2014 and From Net Neutrality to ICT Neutrality, Springer, 2022.

His web page is https://people.rennes.inria.fr/Bruno.Tuffin/Tuffin_en.htm

Google scholar page: https://scholar.google.fr/citations?user=o8PUSSIAAAAJ&hl=fr

Department/

Research                    

Inria is the French national research institute for digital science and technology. World-class research, technological innovation and entrepreneurial risk are its DNA. In 215 project teams, most of which are shared with major research universities, more than 3,900 researchers and engineers explore new paths, often in an interdisciplinary manner and in collaboration with industrial partners to meet ambitious challenges. As a technological institute, Inria supports the diversity of innovation pathways: from open source software publishing to the creation of technological startups (Deeptech).

The Inria Centre at Rennes University was established in 1980. The centre has 30 research teams, 24 being shared with the IRISA mixed research unit. Its  activities occupy over 600 people, scientists and research innovation support staff, including 50 different nationalities. The Inria Centre at Rennes University covers a wide range of expertise in Computer Science, with scientific priorities such as secure digital society, human-robot-virtual world interactions, digital biology and health and digital ecology

The ERMINE team designs and analyses procedures and policies for efficiently managing network operations, but also works on the required measurement and monitoring of performance metrics. Our specific and original management activity will focus on network economics, regulation, and automated decision making. In terms of needed measurement, we make use of standard modelling and performance analysis techniques, but also carry out direct measurements to be analysed statistically. Our activity is a trade-off between methodological/mathematical developments and practical implementations.

Location

Centre Inria de l’Université de Rennes, Rennes, France

Deadline for sending an expression of interest

5th May 2024

Selection of the most promising application(s)

May – June 2024

Writing the MSCA-PF proposal with the support of the above-mentioned supervisor(s)

June – September 2024

  MSCA-PF 2024 call deadline

11th September 2024

Publication of the MSCA-PF evaluation results

February 2025

Start of the MSCA-PF project (if funded)

 May 2025 (at the earliest)