Wow, holy Blogger changes Batman!

Well, who knew that there would be a significant delay between blog postings despite my best of intentions? On the plus side, our accreditation effort is finally complete and I am slowly acclimating to the Associate Chair position and the new responsibilities / things to track. This time I swear, back in the saddle for real (or something).

In the mean time before my longer posts on successful faculty candidate visits, I'll muse a bit on what we have going on in the research front.  Beyond the NetSense study (which is pretty sweet), we are looking at bringing some of our work on self-optimizing networks to the front with respect to data tonnage reduction. As of now, we are toying with the VPN agent on Android to see if we can make a reasonable approximation of libpcap on the phones to avoid the pain / suffering of bringing in a real libpcap.

Theoretically, it may be possible which would be quite exciting as it would save us the trouble of diverting messages to a third part intermediate box (quite similar to what Onavo) does with regards to their "magic box." For those unfamiliar with Onavo, think of a benevolent MITM (Man in the Middle) box that provides object de-duplication similar to what Amazon does with S3, except doing this for a cellular data connection.

We are quite interested in gathering handset-side data with regards to video browsing / performance and pair-wise packet reconstruction is high on the list. Will keep folks posted if we can find a way to do this without the intermediate capture box.