Theophilus Benson

Mike Mwanje, Okemawo Obadofin, Theophilus Benson et al.

Motivated by the growing proliferation of federated learning (FL) in edge environments, we present the first systematic characterization of transport-layer breaking points in FL systems operating under conditions of highly constrained network and compute resources. Using a reproducible testbed with chaos engineering tools, we evaluate Flower under progressively degraded network conditions representative of resource-constrained deployments in Africa and similar environments. Our empirical investigation reveals a fundamental mismatch between FL's burst-idle communication pattern and standard TCP connection management. We identify precise operational boundaries: FL training catastrophically fails at 5-second one-way latency due to TCP handshake timeouts, above 50% packet loss due to buffer exhaustion, and with 90% client dropout rates. Through systematic analysis of connection patterns during training rounds, we demonstrate that FL's periodic model update bursts, separated by extended local training periods, violate the assumptions underlying default TCP configurations. To validate the significance of these findings, we show that adjusting just three TCP connection management parameters can significantly reduce training time under extreme latency, proving that transport-layer awareness is not merely beneficial but essential for FL deployment at the network edge. Our characterization methodology and findings provide practitioners with concrete thresholds for determining when standard FL deployments will fail and when advanced reliability techniques become necessary.

Usama Naseer, Theophilus Benson

The web serving protocol stack is constantly changing and evolving to tackle technological shifts in networking infrastructure and website complexity. As a result of this evolution, the web serving stack includes a plethora of protocols and configuration parameters that enable the web serving stack to address a variety of realistic network conditions. Yet, today, most content providers have adopted a "one-size-fits-all" approach to configuring the networking stack of their user facing web servers (or at best employ moderate tuning), despite the significant diversity in end-user networks and devices. In this paper, we revisit this problem and ask a more fundamental question: Are there benefits to tuning the network stack? If so, what system design choices and algorithmic ensembles are required to enable modern content provider to dynamically and flexibly tune their protocol stacks. We demonstrate through substantial empirical evidence that this "one-size-fits-all" approach results in sub-optimal performance and argue for a novel framework that extends existing CDN architectures to provide programmatic control over the configuration options of the CDN serving stack. We designed ConfigTron a data-driven framework that leverages data from all connections to identify their network characteristics and learn the optimal configuration parameters to improve end-user performance. ConfigTron uses contextual multi-arm bandit-based learning algorithm to find optimal configurations in minimal time, enabling a content providers to systematically explore heterogeneous configurations while improving end-user page load time by as much as 19% (upto 750ms) on median.

Christopher Streiffer, Huan Chen, Theophilus Benson et al.

In recent years, many techniques have been developed to improve the performance and efficiency of data center networks. While these techniques provide high accuracy, they are often designed using heuristics that leverage domain-specific properties of the workload or hardware. In this vision paper, we argue that many data center networking techniques, e.g., routing, topology augmentation, energy savings, with diverse goals actually share design and architectural similarity. We present a design for developing general intermediate representations of network topologies using deep learning that is amenable to solving classes of data center problems. We develop a framework, DeepConfig, that simplifies the processing of configuring and training deep learning agents that use the intermediate representation to learns different tasks. To illustrate the strength of our approach, we configured, implemented, and evaluated a DeepConfig-Agent that tackles the data center topology augmentation problem. Our initial results are promising --- DeepConfig performs comparably to the optimal.