CSC 2209: Computer Networks
Fall 2006

[ Description | Deliverables | News Summary | Project | Schedule ]

Course Description

Instructor: Stefan Saroiu
Lectures: Tuesdays 10-11 and Thursdays 1-2
Location: BA5256 (both on Tuesdays and on Thursdays)

This course has two pre-requisites: (1) you're interested in understanding or exploring modern networking research, and (2) you did take a senior undergraduate networking course (e.g., CSC458) before.

This course is a "core" course. Its target audience is all graduate students (including graduate students in networking and systems). The main goal of the course is that, by the end, the student should be familiar with a number of influential and interesting papers in computer networking and with several topics in computer networking research. To say this in a different way.... by the end of the class, any student should be able to have a technical argument with a networking researcher and win the argument.

This course will emphasize high-level themes and concepts underlying the design and implementation of the Internet and other networking systems (i.e., the "high-level picture".) Click on the Schedule link to see a breakdown of the course's main topics.

Official prerequisite: CSC458 or permission of the instructor.

Course Deliverables

1. The students will read and review research papers. There will be one or two papers assigned as reading for each lecture. The students will submit their paper reviews two hours before lecture. Reviews submitted later than two hours before the lecture will not be read.

2. The students will participate in class. Participation includes but is not limited to asking questions, raising a point, presenting an argument, offering an alternative point of view.

3. At the beginning of each lecture, one student will present a summary of today's news articles appearing in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times related to networking industry and research community. Click here for more details.

4. The students will undertake a group reserch project during the term. The instructor will provide a list of suggestions, but the students are encourage to choose their own topic. Click here for more details.

5. Take-home final exam.

The final grade will depend on:

Syllabus and Schedule

Note: All papers linked from this page are copyrighted by their respective authors or publishers.

Date Topic/Lecture Papers News Summary
T 09/12 Introduction
None writeup
R 09/14 Internet Design J.H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed, D.D. Clark, End-to-End Arguments in System Design, ACM TOCS, Vol 2, N. 4, p 277-288, November 1984. (Check reviews)
D. Clark, The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols, ACM SIGCOMM 1988. (Check reviews)
writeup
T 09/19 Wired MAC & Routing D.R. Boggs, J.C. Mogul, C.A. Kent, Measured Capacity of an Ethernet: Myths and Reality, ACM SIGCOMM 1988. (See also the authors' erratum for this paper.) (Check reviews)
A. Khanna, J. Zinky, The Revised ARPANET Routing Metric, ACM SIGCOMM 1989. (Check reviews)
writeup
R 9/21 Wireless MAC V. Bharghavan, A. Demers, S. Shenker, L. Zhang. MACAW: a media access protocol for wireless LAN's. Sigcomm 94. (Check reviews) writeup
T 9/26 Congestion Control (End-view) V. Jacobson, Congestion Avoidance and Control, ACM SIGCOMM 1988 (Check reviews)
K. K. Ramakrishnan and R. Jain, A Binary Feedback Scheme for Congestion Avoidance in Computer Networks, ACM TOCS, 8(2):158-181, 1990. (Check reviews)
writeup
R 9/28 Congestion Control (Router-view)
Form project groups.
A. Demers, S. Keshav, S. Shenker, Analysis and Simulation of a Fair Queueing Algorithm, ACM SIGCOMM 1989 (Check reviews)
S. Floyd, V. Jacobson, Random Early Detection Gateways for Congestion Avoidance, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, August 1993 (Check reviews)
writeup
T 10/3 Congestion Control (More recent Router-view)
Choose project topic.
R. Mahajan, S. Floyd, D. Wetherall, Controlling High-Bandwidth Flows at the Congested Router. ICNP 2001. (Check reviews)
Dina Katabi, Mark Handley, and Charles Rohrs, Internet Congestion Control for Future High Bandwidth-Delay Product Environments ACM Sigcomm 2002. (Check reviews)
writeup
R 10/5 TCP
L. Brakmo and L. Peterson. TCP Vegas: End-to-end Congestion Avoidance on a Global Internet. IEEE JSAC, 13(8):1465-1480, 1995. (Check reviews)
A. Venkataranami, R. Kokku, M. Dahlin. TCP Nice: A Mechanism for Background Transfers. OSDI 2002. (Check reviews)
writeup
T 10/10 Decoupling Congestion Control
Submit project proposal.
H. Balakrishnan, H. Rahul, S. Seshan. An Integrated Congestion Management Architecture for Internet Hosts. ACM Sigcomm 1999. (Check reviews)
E. Kohler, M. Handley, S. Floyd. Designing DCCP: Congestion Control Without Reliability. ACM Sigcomm 2006. (Check reviews)
writeup
R 10/12 Internet Routing Labovitz, A. Ahuja, A. Bose, F. Jahanian, Delayed Internet Routing Convergence, ACM SIGCOMM 2000 (Check reviews) writeup
T 10/17 Routing around failures D. Andersen, H. Balakrishnan, F. Kaashoek, R. Morris. Resilient Overlay Networks. SOSP 2001. (Check reviews)
K. Gummadi, H. Madhyastha, S. Gribble, H. Levy, D. Wetherall. Improving the Reliability of Internet Paths with One-hope Source Routing. OSDI 2004. (Check reviews)
writeup
R 10/19 TCP Migration A. Snoeren and H. Balakrishnan. An End-to-End Approach to Host Mobility. Mobicom 2000. (Check reviews) writeup
T 10/24 IMC - No class.
R 10/26 IMC - No class.
T 10/31 Multicast Floyd, S., Jacobson, V., Liu, C., McCanne, S., and Zhang, L., A Reliable Multicast Framework for Light-weight Sessions and Application Level Framing. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. (Check reviews)
S. McCanne, V. Jacobson, M. Vetterli. Receiver-driven layered multicast. SIGCOMM 1996. (Check reviews)
writeup
R 11/2 EndHost Multicast
(Canceled)
Y. Chu, S. Rao, S. Seshan, H. Zhang. A Case for End System Multicast. IEEE JSAC 20(3) 2002.
T 11/7 OSDI - No class.
R 11/9 OSDI - No class. Submit project report (due next day 11/10).
T 11/14 Project CheckPoint 5 minute presentation per group project.
R 11/16 Network Measurement V. Paxson, End-to-End Internet Packet Dynamics, SIGCOMM '97 (Check reviews)
N. Spring, R. Mahajan, T. Anderson Quantifying the Causes of Path Inflation. Sigcomm 2003. (Check reviews)
writeup
T 11/21 Workload Measurement S. Saroiu, K. Gummadi, R. Dunn, S. Gribble, H. Levy. An Analysis of Internet Content Delivery Systems. OSDI 2002. (Check reviews)
K. Cho, K. Fukuda, H. Esaki, A. Kato. The Impact and Implications of the Growh in Residential User-to-User Traffic. Sigcomm 2006. (Check reviews)
writeup
R 11/23 Changing the Internet D. Wetherall. Active Network Vision and Reality: Lessons from a Capsule-based System. SOSP 1999. (Check reviews)
Ion Stoica, Daniel Adkins, Shelley Zhuang, Scott Shenker, Sonesh Surana, Internet Indirection Infrastructure. Sigcomm 2002. (Check reviews)
writeup
T 11/28 Internet Evolution D. Clark, J. Wroclawski, K. Sollins, R. Braden. Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow's Internet (Check reviews) Tom
R 11/30 Alternatives M. Gritter and D. Cheriton. An Architecture for Content Routing Support in the Internet. USITS 2001. (Check reviews)
P. Francis and R. Gummadi. IPNL: A NAT-Extended Internet Architecture. Sigcomm 2001. (Check reviews)
T 12/5 How To Have a Good Career In Computer Science
F 12/8 Project Final Presentations
W 12/13 Project Writeup Due
F 12/15 Take-Home Final Released at 9am. Due in 72 hours.