Advanced Computer Networks

Instructor: Brighten Godfrey
Meeting time: Tuesdays and Thursdays 3:30 - 4:45 pm
Meeting location: 1302 SC
Office hours: Tuesdays 5-6 pm, 3211 SC

TA: Giang Nguyen

Computer communication networks are among the most important and influential global infrastructures that humanity has created. CS 538 will explore the guts of the systems that have given rise to so much innovation, how networking is continuing to evolve to support new environments, and challenges in building networked systems that are simultaneously highly robust, efficient, flexible, and secure.

The course provides a foundational and current view of communication networks in order to enable students to perform high-quality research in the area. Topics will include Internet architecture and core protocols for congestion control, forwarding, naming, and routing; approaches to achieve reliability, scalability, and security; and design of data center networks, wireless networks, content delivery, and peer-to-peer networks. Material will range from the classics to the latest results, and from analytical foundations to systems design and real-world deployment.

Class sessions will combine lectures, discussions of reading, and presentations of recent research papers by students. Students will carry out a research project with the goal of publication in a conference.

Course materials

Announcements

Schedule

DateTopicReadings and notes
Tue Aug 28 Course overview and Internet history

No reviews due.

As we may think (V. Bush, Atlantic Monthly, July 1945)
A brief history of the Internet (Leiner et al)
On Distributed Communications Networks (Baran, 1962)

Thu Aug 30

Networking review, Grand Challenges
Project ideas

No reviews due.

Forty Data Communications Research Questions (Partridge, CCR 2011)
Where to look for project ideas

Tue Sep 4 IP architecture

Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn. A protocol for packet network intercommunication. IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. 22 No. 5, May 1974.

David Clark, The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols. Proc. SIGCOMM 1988.

Thu Sep 6 Architectural principles J.H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed and D.D. Clark. End-to-End Arguments in System Design. ACM Trans. on Computer Systems, Vol. 2, No. 4, Nov 1984, pp. 277-288
Tue Sep 11 Congestion control

Congestion Avoidance and Control (Jacobson, SIGCOMM 1988) Note: You need not read the appendices of this paper.

Why flow-completion time is the right metric (Dukkipati, Tech Rep 2005; CCR 2006)

Dah-Ming Chiu and Raj Jain. Analysis of the Increase and Decrease Algorithms for Congestion Avoidance in Computer Networks. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Vol. 17, No. 1, June 1989, pp. 1-14.

Assignment 1 released: pdf

Thu Sep 13 Congestion control in the network

Flow Rate Fairness: Dismantling a Religion (Briscoe, CCR April 2007)

Dina Katabi, Mark Handley, and Charlie Rohrs. Congestion Control for High Bandwidth-Delay Product Networks. SIGCOMM 2002.

Tue Sep 18 Forwarding architecture

50-Gb/s IP Router (Partridge et al., ToN 1998)

Tag Switching Architecture Overview (Rekhter, Davie, Rosen, Swallow, Farinacci, Katz, 1997), RouteBricks (Dobrescu, SOSP 2009), PacketShader (Han, SIGCOMM 2010)

Assignment 1 due

Thu Sep 20 Intradomain routing

TeXCP (Kandula, SIGCOMM 2005)

Tue Sep 25 Interdomain routing and connectivity

BGP routing policies in ISP networks (Caesar and Rexford, IEEE Network Magazine, Nov/Dec 2005)

Anatomy of a Large European IXP (Ager et al., SIGCOMM 2012)

Project proposals due

Thu Sep 27 Scalability

NIRA (Yang, ToN 2007)

Compact routing (Thorup and Zwick, SPAA 2001), SEATTLE (Kim, SIGCOMM 2008), ViAggre (Ballani, NSDI 2009), Scalable routing on flat names (Singla, CoNEXT 2010)

Tue Oct 2 Invited Lecture: Theo Benson
Location: 2405 SC
No reading
Thu Oct 4 ReliabilityRobert, Jas

End-to-End Routing Behavior in the Internet (Paxson, SIGCOMM 1996)

Failure-Carrying Packets (Lakshminarayanan, SIGCOMM 2007)

End-to-End Effects (Savage et al, SIGCOMM 1999), Consensus Routing (John, NSDI 2008), SafeGuard (Li, CoNEXT 2009), R-BGP (Kushman, NSDI 2007), Packet Re-cycling (Sae Lor, Hotnets 2010)

Tue Oct 9 Invited Lecture: Jon Peterson
Location: 2405 SC

No reading

Thu Oct 11 Network games

Selfish routing in Internet-like environments (Qiu, SIGCOMM 2003)

Stable Paths Problem (Griffin, ToN 2002), Selfish Routing (Roughgarden, JACM 2002)

Tue Oct 16 Secure routingUttam, Craig

Survey of BGP security (Butler, Proc IEEE, 2010)

How Secure are Secure Interdomain Routing Protocols? (Goldberg, SIGCOMM 2010), Prefix Hijacking and Interception (Ballani, SIGCOMM 2007), Pretty Good BGP (Karlin, Computer Networks, 2008), Listen and Whisper (Subramanian, NSDI 2004)

Thu Oct 18 Denial of serviceJonathan, Lenhard

DDoS Defense by Offense (Walfish, SIGCOMM 2006)

To Filter or to Authorize (Liu, SIGCOMM 2008), Network-level Behavior of Spammers (Ramachandran, SIGCOMM 2006), Not-a-Bot (Gummadi, NSDI 2009)

Tue Oct 23 Privacy and anonymity — Chris, Carmen

Tor (Dingledine, USENIX Security 2004), Telex (Wustrow, USENIX Security 2011; see also telex.cc)

Thu Oct 25 Software defined networks — Sachin, Larry

ONIX (Koponen, OSDI 2010)

Recommended video, no review: The Future of Networking, and the Past of Protocols (Shenker, ONS 2011)

Routing Control Platform (Caesar, NSDI 2005), NOX (Gude, CCR 2008), OpenFlow (McKeown, 2008) (See also OpenFlow web site)

Tue Oct 30 Project midterm presentations Project midterm presentations due
Thu Nov 1 Project midterm presentations
Tue Nov 6 Data center networks — Faraz, Prasanna
Field trip, 4:10 - 5:00 pm

VL2: A Scalable and Flexible Data Center Network (Greenberg et al, SIGCOMM 2009)

Helios: A Hybrid Electrical/Optical Switch Architecture for Modular Data Centers (Farrington et al, SIGCOMM 2010), PortLand (Mysore et al, SIGCOMM 2009), BCube (Guo et al, SIGCOMM 2009), c-Through (Wang et al, SIGCOMM 2010)

Thu Nov 8 Data center transport — Abhishek, Rohan

Hunting Mice with Microsecond Circuit Switches (Farrington et al, HotNets 2012)

Jellyfish (Singla et al, NSDI 2012), Deconstructing Datacenter Packet Transport (Alizadeh et al, HotNets 2012), Less is More (Alizadeh et al, NSDI 2012), Multipath TCP (Wischik, NSDI 2011), Improving Datacenter Performance and Robustness with Multipath TCP (Wischik, SIGCOMM 2011)

Assignment 2 released: pdf
Tue Nov 13 Content distribution — Hao-Chan, Chethan

A Case for a Coordinated Internet Video Control Plane (Liu, Dobrian, Milner, Jiang, Sekar, Stoica, Zhang, SIGCOMM 2012)

Understanding the Impact of Video Quality on User Engagement (Dobrian, SIGCOMM 2011), Experiences with CoralCDN: A Five-Year Operational View (Freedman, NSDI 2010), BitTorrent incentives (Levin, SIGCOMM 2008)

Thu Nov 15 Internet measurementRashid, Phuong

The Collateral Damage of Internet Censorship by DNS Injection (Anonymous, CCR 2011)

An Untold Story of Middleboxes in Cellular Networks (Wang, Qian, Xu, Mao, Zhang, SIGCOMM 2011), Internet Inter-Domain Traffic (Labovitz, SIGCOMM 2010), California Fault Lines (Turner, SIGCOMM 2010), Delayed Internet Routing Convergence (Labovitz, ToN 2001), Impact of Routing Events (Wang, SIGCOMM 2006), Reverse traceroute (Katz-Bassett, NSDI 2010), Broadband Internet performance: a view from the gateway (Sundaresan, SIGCOMM 2011)

Assignment 2 due (solutions)
Thanksgiving Vacation
Tue Nov 27 WirelessParamvir, Yunlong

Mirror Mirror on the Ceiling (Zhou et al, SIGCOMM 2012)

ZigZag Decoding (Gollakota, SIGCOMM 2008), Efficient Error Estimating Coding (Chen, SIGCOMM 2010), They can hear your heartbeats (Gollakota, SIGCOMM 2011)

Thu Nov 29 Future Internet architecturesMo, Pratik

Tor instead of IP (Liu, Han, Krishnamurthy, Anderson, HotNets 2011)

Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow's Internet (Clark, Transactions in Networking, 2005), Accountable Internet Protocol (Anderson, SIGCOMM 2008), HTTP as the Narrow Waist (Popa, Hotnets 2010), Pathlets (Godfrey, SIGCOMM 2009), Data-Oriented Network Architecture (Koponen, SIGCOMM 2007), Networking Named Content (Jacobson, CoNEXT 2009), Software-Defined Internet Architecture (Raghavan et al, Hotnets 2012)

Tue Dec 4 Overlay and P2PFred, Hilfi
Guest Lecture: Prof. Indranil Gupta

Chord (Stoica, Karger, Kaashoek, Balakrishnan, SIGCOMM 2001)

Resilient Overlay Networks (Anderson, SOSP 2001), Minimizing Churn (Godfrey, SIGCOMM 2006), Sybil-proof DHT (Lesniewski-Laas, NSDI 2010), Dynamo: Amazon's highly available key-value store (DeCandia, SOSP 2007), i3 (Stoica, SIGCOMM 2002), OpenDHT (Rhea, SIGCOMM 2005), UIA (Ford, OSDI 2006)

Thu Dec 6 Social networks — Mainak, Vishnu

SybilGuard (Yu, Kaminsky, Gibbons, Flaxman, SIGCOMM 2006)

Tue Dec 11
Course wrap-up
Thu Dec 13 Final paper due
Fri Dec 14 Poster session, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m., Siebel Center atrium Poster due