Seminars INGI - April 24 at 1:00 pm

• Aurélien Buchet, PhD researcher @ ICTEAM, will present his work on An Analysis of QUIC Connection Migration in the Wild. 

As QUIC gains attention, more applications that leverage its capabilities are emerging. These include defenses against on-path IP tracking and traffic analysis. However, the deployment of the underlying required support for connection migration remains largely unexplored. This paper provides a comprehensive examination of the support of the QUIC connection migration mechanism over the Internet. We perform Internet-wide scans revealing that despite a rapid evolution in the deployment of QUIC on web servers, some of the most popular destinations do not support connection migration yet.

• Seyyidahmed Lahmer, Postdoctoral researcher @ ICTEAM, will present his work on Direct Device-to-Device Communication: Rethinking the End-to-End Principle with SmartNICs   

The presentation will explore a novel approach to networking that challenges conventional end-to-end communication paradigms. Traditionally, the end-to-end principle has guided the design of network systems, where the central CPU orchestrates and mediates all data exchanges. In my current postdoctoral work, I am investigating an alternative model that enables direct, "particle-to-particle" communication between devices (referred to here as “particles” — including NVMe drives, GPUs, and other specialized hardware) without relying on the CPU as the intermediary.

At the heart of this approach lies the smartNIC, which functions as a sophisticated (de)multiplexer for diverse data flows. Additionally, my research explores software-hardware co-design by leveraging not only dRMT-style ASICs but also investigating architectural approaches that utilize FPGAs. This dual strategy is designed to overcome the limitations of current systems by providing more tailored, efficient data paths.

The talk will also revisit my earlier PhD research on balancing the efficiency versus efficacy trade-offs in AI-native networks