"We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." -- Dave Clark

Some of the many products we have released over the years.

  • namehelp - An extensible proxying DNS server that allows users to get the benefits of third-party DNS servers (e.g. Google Public DNS) while avoiding the performance penalty for CDN-hosted content normally incurred when using remote DNS.
  • FixIt! – An app to crowdsource the report and report validation of issues requiring city attention such as broken streetlights, potholes, and graffiti. This app was awarded 5th place in the Apps 4 Metro Chicago challenge, Community Round.
  • TrailBlaze Chicago – An app to crowdsource the planning and status report of bike paths. This app came in 2nd in the Apps 4 Metro Chicago Grand Challenge, and 4th in the Apps 4 Metro Chicago Challenge, Transportation Round (and 1st among the not-for-profit!).
    • http://aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/projects/trailblaze-chicago
  • Dasu – An extension to the popular Vuze/Azureus BitTorrent client. Dasu is a dual-objective system providing ISP characterization (including the detection of network interference) and supporting Internet measurement experimentation.
  • SwarmScreen – An extension to the popular Vuze/Azureus BitTorrent client to make it difficult to classify users’ downloading behavior by looking at his/her connection patterns.
  • NEWS – A system for Network Early Warning System built by taking advantage of the natural P2P traffic. NEWS is implemented as plugin/extension for the BitTorrent Azureus client.
  • SideStep/DraFTP – The SideStep service reuses CDN information to locate quality overlay paths in the Internet with minimum overhead. We also implemented DraFTP, and open-source FTP suite that uses SideStep to improve download performance.
  • Ono – A plugin/extension for the Azureus client that implements our proposed CDN-based positioning for peer selection in the popular BitTorrent system.
  • STRAW – An integrated mobility and traffic model for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs); STRAW’s current implementation is written for the JiST/SWANS discrete-event simulator.
  • SWANS++ – An extensions to the Jist/SWANS Discrete-event Simulator, including new/re-implementation of well-known protocols, mobility models and a steering/visualization tool.
  • Ceratias – Real-time visualization tool for the JiST/SWANS simulation platform. Also enables interaction with and online modification of the ongoing simulation, and can be detached/re-attached dynamically for performance.
  • Nemo – Reference implementation of a structurally resilient, performance-centric overlay multicast protocol for streaming applications.
  • The Nixes Tool Set - A set of bash scripts to install, maintain, control and monitor applications on PlanetLab.
  • FatNemo and FatScribe - Addressing the bandwidth constraints of conventional tree multicast approaches by importing Leiserson's fat-trees from parallel computing into overlay networks.
  • NUPastry - Resilient DHT - Reference implementation of NUPastry, a resilient distributed hash table (DHT).
  • NUScribe - Resilient DHT-based multicast - Reference implementation of NUScribe and a work-in-progress version of NUSplitStreaming providing many of the proposed SplitStream features.