COMP/ELEC 529

COMP/ELEC 529 - Computer Network Protocols and Systems
Rice University

Fall 2005

Instructor

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

Teaching Assistant

TBA

Meeting

1:00pm - 2:20pm, Tuesdays & Thursdays
Room: KH 105 (Howard Keck Hall, Building 23 on Rice campus map)

Course Overview

Computer networking is a rapidly evolving discipline with many exciting opportunities. Challenges that arise in networking and particularly in the Internet tend to be truly global problems that impact millions of users. However, existing solutions to many of the classical challenges (e.g. routing, congestion control, quality-of-service, management) remain unsatisfactory, while new challenges (e.g. worm, denial-of-service, peer-to-peer) are emerging as people continue to use the Internet in ways the original designers did not anticipate in the 70's and 80's. In the long run, coping with the complexity of the Internet may become the ultimate challenge.

The goals of this graduate level course are to provide students with a proper grounding in the basic concepts and seminal work in computer network protocols and systems, and to introduce students to some of the most exciting recent research developments. The basic concepts covered include network architecture, switching, routing, congestion control, and quality-of-service. The advanced research topics will focus on network structural measurement and modeling, network scaling and management, overlay networking and peer-to-peer systems, network security, and new network architectures.

Course Format

The course will consist of lectures, paper readings and reviews, and a group research project. The lectures will begin with a broad overview of the basic concepts in computer networking and gradually transition to the advanced topics. Each lecture will be based on one or two research papers. Students must read the assigned papers and submit paper reviews before each lecture. Students will also form teams of two, each team will tackle a well-defined research project during the semester. A list of suggested project topics will be provided. All projects are subjected to approval by the instructor. The project component will include a short written project proposal, a short mid-term project presentation, a final project presentation and a final project report.

Prerequisites

Undergraduate experience with operating systems, computer networking, and algorithms is required.

Grading

Paper reviews	30%
Project proposal, presentations, and final report	60% (Project grading breakdown: proposal 5%, mid-term presentation 20%, final presentation 25%, final report 50%)
Class participation	10%

Writing and Submitting Review

All students must read the assigned papers and write reviews for the papers before each lecture. Email the reviews to the instructor (eugeneng at cs.rice.edu) prior to each lecture and the reviews will be posted on the course web page. Periodically, the instructor will evaluate a random subset of the reviews and provide feedback and grades to students.

Do not send reviews as email attachments. Please send one review in plain text 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:

comp529review:[PaperID]

Recognizing that not everyone has had experience writing reviews, the reviews on or before 9/30/2004 will be graded on a credit/no-credit basis.

A review should summarize the paper sufficiently to demonstrate your understanding, should point out the paper's contributions, strengths as well as weaknesses. Think in terms of what makes good research? What qualities make a good paper? What are the potential future impacts of the work? Note that there is no right or wrong answer to these questions. A review's quality will mainly depend on its thoughtfulness. Restating the abstract/conclusion of the paper will not earn a top grade. In reading papers and writing your reviews, you may consider the following questions:

What are the 3 most important things the paper says? These could be some combination of their motivations, observations, interesting parts of the design, or clever parts of their implementation.
- from author's perspective at the time
- from your perspective with the benefit of hindsight
Describe the paper's single most glaring deficiency. Every paper has some fault. Perhaps an experiment was poorly designed or the main idea had a narrow scope or applicability. Being able to assess weaknesses as well as strengths is an important skill for this course and beyond.
What were the key observations that had led to the research direction? Where did the observations come from? Personal experience? Work environment?
What were the key obstacles or risks that could have presented the research from being successful? Were the researchers aware of them? How were these obstacles eventually overcome?

When reading the papers, it is important to understand the contexts in which the research was done. First, check out the year of the paper. Then you may want to consider the following contexts:

Intellectual context: leaders in field, major research directions/themes at the time, assumptions that are taken for granted at the time. Best way is to glance through the relevant ACM conferences in the previous couple of years.
Industry context: competitive landscape, technology/industry trends, primary industry concerns.
Personal context: researcher's stage of career, researcher's physical and people environment

Project

The course project is intended to be a mini-research project that allows each student team (2 people) to explore an aspect of computer networking that is of interest during the course of the semester. Each student team will most likey work on a different topic. There will be three milestones in the project component: (1) project selection and proposal, (2) mid-term presentation, (3) final presentation and report. Further details will be provided during class.

Reference Textbook

Computer Networks: A Systems Approach, 3rd Edition
by Larry Peterson, Bruce S. Davie
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann; 3 edition (May, 2003)
ISBN: 155860832X

Schedule

Under construction, subject to changes. The reading list with links to papers is here.

Class	Date	Topic	Primary paper(s)	Other paper(s) (no review needed)	Your reviews	Notes	Remarks
1	8/23	Overview	None assigned
2	8/25	What is good research?		[McC96],[Sto00],Advice site
3	8/30	Network architectures	[SRC84],[Mos96]	[Zim80]	[SRC84],[Mos96]
4	9/1	TCP/IP	[CK74],[Cla88]	[Pos81a],[Pos81b]	[CK74],[Cla88]
5	9/6	LAN: Ethernet	None assigned				Suggested project topics out
6	9/8	Ethernet Robustness	[MNZ04],[ECN05]		[MNZ04],[ECN05]
7	9/13	Intra-domain routing	None assigned
8	9/15	Inter-domain routing	[LAB+00],[GSW02]	[S+99],[LMJ97],[Pax96]	[LAB+00],[GSW02]
9	9/20	Congestion control I	[Jac88],[CJ89]	[RCJ88],[Jac90]	[Jac88],[CJ89]
10	9/22						Class cancelled due to Hurricane Rita
11	9/27	Congestion control II	[FJ93],[LAJ+03]		[FJ93],[LAJ+03]		Project proposals due
12	9/29	Quality of service, Intserv	[DKS89],[SSZ98]	[PG93]	[DKS89],[SSZ98]
13	10/4	Quality of service, Intserv	[SZN97], [Z+93]	[BZ96]	[SZN97], [Z+93]
14	10/6	Quality of service, Diffserv	[SZ99]		[SZ99]
15	10/11	Mid-term recess
16	10/13	Topology measurement & modeling	[FFF99], [LBC+03]		[FFF99 ], [LBC+03]
17	10/18	Topology measurement & modeling	[LAW+04], [NZ02]		[LAW+04], [NZ02]
18	10/20	Mid-term project presentations					Mid-term project presentations
19	10/25	Circuit switching	[MMZ02], [MM03]		[MMZ02], [MM03]		Debate
20	10/27	No class					No class
21	11/1	Overlay networks I	[ABK+01],[CRS+02]		[ABK+01],[CRS+02]
22	11/3	Overlay networks II	[QYZ+03],[CDH+02]		[QYZ+03],[CDH+02]
23	11/8	Peer-to-peer systems	[CDK+03],[SAZ+02]		[CDK+03],[SAZ+02]
24	11/10	Network Management	[FGL+01],[FT00]		[FGL+01],[FT00]
25	11/15	Network security	[SWK+00],[ARW03]		[SWK+00],[ARW03]		Debate
26	11/17	Network security	[MSV+03],[CCC+05]		[MSV+03],[CCC+05]
27	11/22	New network architectures	[Wet99],[GHM+05]		[Wet99],[GHM+05]
28	11/24	Thanksgiving holiday					Thanksgiving holiday
29	11/29	Project presentations
30	12/1	Project presentations					Project presentations
	12/8	Final project reports due					Final project reports due