Home Houssam ElBouanani

Houssam ElBouanani

PhD student, Inria
Université Côte d’Azur

2004, route des lucioles
06902 Sophia Antipolis, France
Tel : +33 4 89 73 24 02
Email : houssam (dot) elbouanani (at) inria (dot) fr

Biography

I am a PhD student at Centre de Recherche Inria de l’Université Côte d’Azur working under the supervision of Dr. Walid Dabbous, Dr. Chadi Barakat, and Dr. Thierry Turletti.

I graduated with a Master of Science degree (Ubinet, class of 2019) from Polytech Nice-Sophia (Université Côte d’Azur, France). My thesis was on efficient network monitoring in modern data centres, supervised by Dr. Chadi Barakat, Pr. Guillaume Urvoy-Keller, and Dr. Dino Lopez Pacheco.

I had also graduated with a Master of Engineering degree from the Moroccan National Institute of Posts and Telecommunications.

My research is aimed at providing scalable and accurate means to deliver reproducible scholarship in computer networks and distributed systems. I am particularly interested in network emulators and how to overcome their limits. The distinctive characteristic of my inquiries is the application of tools and theories from network monitoring: delay measurement, network tomography, and performance evaluation. I am also curious about the broader problems that questions in those specific topics inform us about: which limits to delay measurement are imposed by the physical nature of time itself? and which structural issues within scientific research does our relationship to reproducibility manifest?

Research Interests

  • Network emulation
  • Reproducible research
  • Internet measurements
  • Network virtualisation

Projects

  • High-fidelity Emulation: a framework for assessing the fidelity of network emulation through monitoring of packet delay. Under the assumption that delay captures most information about network traffic conditions, and by a simple model of wired network links, the tool can detect when packet delay is off from its reference values and infer emulation inaccuracy. The framework is integrated in BigNet, but is also available as a plug-in for Mininet and Mininet-like emulators. Its design and engineering has been packaged into a paper and has been accepted for publication in COMSNETS 2023’s TASIR workshop.
  • BigNet: a Mininet-inspired lightweight distributed network emulator for extreme-scale reproducible network experimentation. The software implements most of Mininet’s features and provides the same API but allows the deployment of very large emulated networks using multiple physical hosts. Compared to state-of-the-art distributed emulators, it performs much better in terms of scalability, and natively implements high-fidelity monitoring. [Github]
  • Non-intrusive delay measurement: a proof-of-concept for an eBPF-based high-precision and low-overhead passive delay measurement tool for virtual overlay networks. It uses eBPF to plug packet measurement and monitoring code into the traffic control subsystem of the Linux kernel. Its operation incurs minimal overhead to networking (few microseconds of delay) which can be arbitrarily reduced through sampling. Although initially designed for monitoring emulated network (description of its design has been published in MedComNet 2021 and extended for Elsevier COMCOM vol. 195), it can work with any device running Linux.

Publications

  • Houssam ElBouanani, Chadi Barakat, Walid Dabbous, and Thierry Turletti, Troubleshooting distributed network emulation, In proceedings of IEEE 26th Conference on Innovation in Clouds, Internet, and Networks (ICIN 2023).
  • Houssam ElBouanani, Chadi Barakat, Walid Dabbous, and Thierry Turletti, Delay-based fidelity monitoring of network emulation, Testbeds for Advanced Systems Implementation and Research (TASIR workshop), IEEE 15th International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS 2023). [HAL]
  • Houssam ElBouanani, Chadi Barakat, Walid Dabbous, and Thierry Turletti, Fidelity-aware distributed network emulation, In proceedings of IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications and Networking (CSCN 2022). [HAL]
  • Houssam ElBouanani, Chadi Barakat, Walid Dabbous, and Thierry Turletti, Passive delay measurement for fidelity monitoring of distributed network emulation, Elsevier Computer Communications Journal (COMCOM), volume 195, pages 40-48. Nov. 2022. [HAL]
  • Houssam ElBouanani, Chadi Barakat, Walid Dabbous, Thierry Turletti, Passive delay measurement for fidelity monitoring of distributed network emulation, In Proceedings of IEEE 20th Mediterranean Communication and Computer Networking Conference (MedComNet), Ibiza, Spain. Jun. 2021. [HAL]
  • Houssam ElBouanani, Chadi Barakat, Dino Lopez Pacheco, and Guillaume Urvoy-Keller, Collaborative traffic measurement for virtualized data center networks, In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Cloud Networking, Coimbra, Portugal, Nov. 2019. [HAL]

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