Valas Valancius presented a paper on tiered pricing strategies for the Internet transit market at SIGCOMM 2011.  The paper used traffic demand data from three different ISPs to analyze how ISP profit varied when ISPs sell service according to different "tiers", as opposed to having a single flat-rate pricing system for all traffic.  The paper found that ISPs can capture near-optimal profits by differentiating pricing for Internet traffic into just a few tiers.

Read more about the results in the popular media:

• The Economist
• Ars Technica

Joon Kim, Srikanth Sundaresan, Marshini Chetty presented an OpenFlow-based system called uCap to help users manage their home network usage.  With UCap, users and devices in the home network can be allotted "caps" - a fixed volume of data per month, and this cap is enforced by the home router. With limited usage the norm in many parts of the world and recently in the US, such a system allows the user control over their Internet.

The system is a collaboration between the GTNoise group and human-computer interaction researchers at Georgia Tech.  The back-end system uses a custom OpenFlow controller that is especially designed for processing network events.  The front-end is an HTML5 Web interface that allows users to easily view and manage their home usage.

uCap has also been demonstrated at the following conferences:

• The 12th GENI Engineering Conference, November 2011
• The Open Networking Summit at Stanford University, October 2011
• Broadband2020, Georgia Tech, October 2011
• GVU Research Day, Georgia Tech, October 2011

Ph.D. student Sam Burnett developed Collage, a tool that relies on user-generated content sites like Flickr to help citizens in countries oppressed by censorship communicate more openly.  The basic idea is to hide censored content in seemingly innocuous photos that are hosted on user-generated content sites like Flickr.  Below is a conceptual diagram explaining how Collage works:

For more information about how Collage works, please see the full paper.  For more information, and to contribute to or download the code, please see the Collage project home page.

You can also read about Collage in various trade articles:

• New Scientist
• GigaOM
• Ars Technica
• Network World

Colalge also appeared on Slashdot twice; Professor Feamster also recently blogged about Collage, here.

Ph.D. student Valas Valancius has been developing the Transit Portal, software that gives services hosted on cloud infrastructures like Amazon EC2 direct control over inbound and outbound traffic.  Different services may have different service requirements: some services may require connectivity that satisfies strict performance requirements (e.g., interactive services or gaming may require low latency or packet loss), while other services might wish to simply use the least expensive connectivity.  Unfortunately, today's cloud providers select the same routes for every service hosted on the cloud infrastructure (effectively doing "one size fits all" routing for all hosted services).

The Transit Portal allows each service hosted in a cloud to perform its own Internet routing.  For more information on Transit Portal, see the full paper, or check out the following articles:

• Technology Review
• IEEE Network

Professor Nick Feamster also blogged about the Transit Portal here.  Lots of information about Transit Portal, including information about how to install a Transit Portal yourself, is available on the GENI project wiki for Transit Portal.