COMP 629

COMP 629 - Graduate Seminar in Computer Networks
Rice University

Spring 2004

Instructor

Prof. T. S. Eugene Ng
Office: Duncan Hall 3005
Email: eugeneng at cs.rice.edu

Meeting

4:00pm - 5:30pm, Thursdays
Room: See schedule below

Seminar Schedule

Class	Date	Room	Paper title	Primary paper for debate (review needed)	Related paper (review optional)	Other (no review needed)	Defense	Offense
1	1/22	DH 3076	Is IP going to take over the world (of communications)?	[MMZ02] Reviews	[Cla88] Reviews		Ansley/Alan Presentation	Shu/Johnny Presentation
2	1/29	DH 3076	FAST TCP: motivation, architecture, algorithms, performance	[JWL04] Reviews	[Jac88] Reviews	[Jac90]	Anwis/Ajay Presentation (slides borrowed from Caltech)	Animesh/ Santa Presentation
3	2/5	DH 3092	Skip for CITI talk
4	2/12	DH 3092	Internet Routing Instability	[LMJ97] Reviews	[Pax96] Reviews		Soups/Ahamed Presentation	Scott/Atul Presentation
5	2/19	McMurtry Auditorium	Preventing Internet Denial-of-Service with Capabilities	[ARW03] Reviews	[S+00] Reviews		Khaled/Anupam Presentation	Amit/Khoa Presentation
6	2/26	DH 3076	The Effects of Active Queue Management on Web Performance	[L+03] Reviews	[FJ93] Reviews	[RFC2309]	Andreas Presentation	Santa Presentation
7	3/4	DH 3092	Mid-semester break
8	3/11	DH 3092	Towards a Logic for Wide-Area Internet Routing	[FB03] Reviews			Sumit Presentation	Ajay Presentation
9	3/18	DH 1049	Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow's Internet	[C+02] Reviews			Khoa Presentation	Ahamed Presentation
10	3/25	DH3076 Special time 5:30pm	ANTS: A Toolkit for Building and Dynamically Deploying Network Protocols	[WGT98] Reviews			Amit Presentation	Johnny Presentation
11	4/1	DH 3092	No class
12	4/8	DH3110 ?	A Load-Balanced Switch with an Arbitrary Number of Linecards	[KCM04] Reviews			Animesh Presentation	Anwis Presentation
13	4/15	DH 3076	Internet Quarantine: Requirements for Containing Self-Propagating Code	[M+03] Reviews			Aleksander Presentation	Soups Presentation
14	4/22	DH 3076	MPLS: The Magic Behind the Myths	[A00] Reviews			Scott Presentation	Sumit Presentation

Overview

Networking is a fascinating research area. The diversity of forums for discussing networking research has dramatically expanded in recent years (e.g. IMC, IPTPS, HotNets, FDNA, MobiSys, NSDI, etc). This is no coincident. Networking is a broad and rapidly evolving area. Technological advances are created daily at all layers of the protocol stack by both the commercial industries and by academics. The Internet is also arguably the most complex and most heterogeneously managed computer system in the world. This complexity makes it difficult to understand the behavior of the Internet. Challenges that arise in the Internet tend to be truly global problems that impact millions of Internet users. Existing solutions to many of the classical challenges (e.g. TCP, QoS, multicast, management, routing) remain unsatisfactory. New challenges (e.g. worms, DoS, P2P, spam, IPv6 transition) are also emerging as people continue to use the Internet in ways the original designers did not anticipate in the 70's and 80's.

The goal of this seminar is to provide an introductory exploration of networking research by examining some of the classical and emerging challenges in networking through engaging, enlightening, and hopefully entertaining debates. Many of the design principles behind the Internet remain in dispute today. Many of the latest networking ideas are highly controversial. Finally, many of the classical papers in networking are worth going back to for a re-examination.

Debate Format (Adopted from Prof. Ed Knightly)

A paper or a set of related papers will be assigned one week in advance. Two teams of students will be chosen to debate and lead the discussion. One team will be designated the offense and the other the defense. In class, the defense team will present first. For 30 minutes the team will discuss the work as if it were their own.

The team should present the work and make a compelling case why the contribution is significant. This will include the context of the contribution, prior work, and in cases where papers are previously published, how the work has influenced the research community or industry's directions (impact). If the paper is very recent, the defense should present arguments for the potential impact. Coming up with potential future work can show how the paper opens doors to new research.
The presentation should go well beyond a paper "summary". The defense should not critique the work other than to try to pre-empt attacks from the offense (e.g., by explicitly limiting the scope of the contribution).
The defense should also try to look up related work to support their case (CiteSeer is a good place to start looking).

After the defense presentation, the offense team will state their case for 20 minutes.

This team should critique the work, and make a case for missing links, unaddressed issues, lack of impact, inappropriateness of the problem formulation, etc.
The more insightful and less obvious the criticisms the better.
While the offense should prepare remarks in advance, they should also react to the points made by the defense.
The offense should also try to look up related work to support their case (CiteSeer is a good place to start looking).

Next, the defense and offense will be allowed follow up arguments, and finally, the class will question either side either for clarifications or to add to the discussions and controversy and make their own points on either side. At the end, the class will informally vote for the winner of the debate.

The presentations should be written in Powerpoint format (for better or worse) and will be posted on the seminar web page after each class.

Writing and Submitting Reviews

All students participating in the seminar should read the assigned papers and write short succint reviews for the papers. Email the reviews to Eugene (eugeneng at cs.rice.edu) prior to each seminar and the reviews will be posted on the seminar web page for everyone to read.

Please do not send reviews as email attachments. Please send one review per email in the body of the email message. In your email, please use the following format for the subject line to enable some automation:

comp629review:[AuthorYear]

For example, for the first paper, you should use the subject line: comp629review:[MMZ02].