MAKI Scientific Workshop

Prof. Anja Feldmann

(Technische Universität – Berlin)

Titel

Back-Office traffic on the Internet

Abstract

Most often when people think about the Web or the Internet they only consider the interactions between the browser and the front-end server. Indeed, although traffic between Web servers and Web browsers is readily apparent to many knowledgeable end users, fewer are aware of the extent of server-to-server Web traffic carried over the public Internet. We refer to the former class of traffic as front-office Internet Web traffic and the latter as back-office Internet Web traffic (or just front-office and back-office traffic, for short).

Back-office traffic, which may or may not be triggered by end-user activity, is essential for today’s Web as it supports a number of popular but complex Web services including large-scale content delivery, social networking, indexing, searching, advertising, and proxy services. This talk takes a first look at back-office traffic, measuring it from various vantage points, including from within ISPs, IXPs, and CDNs. We then discuss implications and opportunities that the presence of back-office traffic presents for the Internet ecosystem.

Short Bio

Since 2006 Prof. Anja Feldmann, Ph.D. is a full professor at the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany. From 2009 to 2013 she was Dean of the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department of TU Berlin, Germany. From 2000 to 2006 she headed the network architectures group first at Saarland University and then at TU München. Before that (1995 to 1999) she was a member of the Networking and Distributed Systems Center at AT&T Labs — Research in Florham Park, New Jersey. Her current research interests include Internet measurement, traffic engineering and traffic characterization, network performance debugging, intrusion detection, network architecture. She has published more than 60 papers and has served on more than 50 program committees, including as Co-Chair of ACM SIGCOMM 2003 and ACM IMC 2011 and as Co-PC-Chair of ACM SIGCOMM 2007 and ACM IMC 2009.

She is a recipient of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Preis 2011, the highest honor awarded in German research, and the Berliner Wissenschaftspreis 2011. She is a member of the German National Acadamy of Sciences Leopoldina, the BBAW, the supervisory board of SAP AG. In the past she was a member of the scientific board of Inria and and of the technical advisory board of Endace. She received a M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany, in 1990 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA, in 1991 and 1995, respectively.