Enabling Users to Control Their Internet

Explore a 17-minute conference talk from USENIX NSDI '23 that introduces CRAB, an innovative system designed to give users control over their internet bandwidth allocation. Learn how this receiver-side solution enables users to specify weights for incoming data flows without requiring support from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or senders. Discover the novel control loop mechanism that estimates available downlink capacity and flow demands, computes fair share rates, and throttles flows accordingly. Understand the challenges of ambiguous demand and capacity estimation at the receiver end, and how CRAB's design addresses these issues. Examine the implementation on Linux machines and Linksys home routers, and review evaluation results demonstrating significant improvements in web page load times and video quality compared to current standards.