###  Applicant  ###

Cameron Dale
Master's Student
Department of Computing Science
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, BC, Canada
camerond@cs.sfu.ca
http://www.camrdale.org

Senior Supervisor: Dr. Jiangchuan Liu  (jcliu@cs.sfu.ca)

I am not eligible for US- or Euro-NF partner-based program or other
travel funding.

###  Research Interests  ###

My current research is focussed mainly on BitTorrent. One aspect I have
studied is the effectiveness of the rarest-first policy to evenly
distribute pieces of the download throughout the peers. I have found
that the policy is mostly effective at maintaining a near-optimal piece
population distribution, though there are some areas for improvement.

I have also examined the different network topologies formed between
peers in a BitTorrent swarm. Some of the networks I have found to have
scale-free behaviour, verifying the resilience of the swarm to the
failures and departures that are common in all peer-to-peer networking
scenarios. Others that were previously thought to have small-world
characteristics, I have found to contain very little clustering. I have
therefore designed an enhancement to the BitTorrent tracker to introduce
clustering and create a small-world from the BitTorrent swarm, which
should improve the effectiveness of the BitTorrent protocol at
distributing the download to peers.

In collaboration with another student, Xu Cheng, we have studied the
video sharing site YouTube. This new type of video distribution has not
seen much research yet, and we find some interesting differences between
it and traditional video distribution. My work focussed mostly on the
social networking aspect of YouTube, which is unique among video sharing
sites. The results showed that YouTube videos form a small-world
network, which suggests that videos are strongly correlated with each
other. This feature can be used to develop interesting caching or
peer-to-peer distribution strategies for videos.

The above works have been published in IEEE Globecom and IWQoS.

###  Accomplishments  ###

Degrees:

Bachelor of Science, major in Honors Applied Physics, minor in Computing
Science, Simon Fraser University, 2000

Awards:

$17,500 NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship M, 2007

Publications:

C. Dale and J. Liu, "Leveraging Altruistic Peers to Reduce the
Bandwidth Costs of Free Content Downloads" (poster), ACM SIGCOMM'08,
Seattle, WA, August 17-22, 2008.

C. Dale, J. Liu, J. Peters, B. Li, "Evolution and Enhancement of
BitTorrent Network Topologies", IEEE IWQoS, University of Twente,
Netherlands, June 2-4, 2008.

X. Cheng, C. Dale, J. Liu, "Understanding the Characteristics of
Internet Short Video Sharing: YouTube as a Case Study", IEEE IWQoS,
University of Twente, Netherlands, June 2-4, 2008.

C. Dale, J. Liu, "A Measurement Study of Piece Population in
BitTorrent", Proc. IEEE Globecom, Washington, DC, USA, November 26-30,
2007.

X.K. Chen, R. Wiersma, C.X. Wang, O.J. Pitts, C. Dale, C.R. Bolognesi,
S.P. Watkins, "Local vibrational modes of carbon in GaSb and GaAsSb",
Applied Physics Letters, 80, 1942 (2002).

S.P. Watkins, O. Pitts, C. Dale, X.G.Xu, M. Dvorak, N. Matine, and C.R.
Bolognesi, "Heavily carbon-doped GaAsSb grown on InP for HBT
applications", Journal of Crystal Growth, 221, 59 (2000).

###  Plans for Future Research  ###

Using my previous work on BitTorrent as a foundation, I am currently
working on a new peer-to-peer download system for distributors of free
content over the web (mostly software packages, which have different
characteristics as compared to other files downloaded by BitTorrent).
The system uses a Distributed Hash Table to support downloading the
individual content files from peers, which reduces the strain on the
network of mirrors that is usually required to support the downloads.
This work includes implementing a new download client for software
packages of Debian-based systems called apt-p2p.

The first version of this software was released last month, and has
since attracted over 100 users. For more info, see:

    http://www.camrdale.org/apt-p2p.html

    http://packages.debian.org/sid/apt-p2p

A poster about the design of this new system has been accepted by
SIGCOMM'08, and I plan to attend it to present my work, and more
importantly, to get feedback from the audience of this top
networking conference.

###  Courses  ###

Undergraduate GPA: 3.92

Graduate Courses:
CMPT 705: Design and Analysis of Computing Algorithms     A
CMPT 740: Database Systems                                A-
CMPT 765: Computer Networks                               A+
CMPT 816: Theory of Communication Networks                A+
CMPT 880: Special Topics: Multimedia & Sensor Networking  A+

###  Expenses  ###

Registration:       $350
Travel (driving):   $ 60
Lodging (4 nights): $414
Meals:              $100
------------------- ----
Total               $924