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Readings

HW, exams

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Readings         

Note: a number of the documents below are password-protected, in order to allow access ONLY by students in this course. If you're a student, you've received access information in class. This password-protected material is copyrighted; please respect the auhtors intellectual property - this material is for the personal use of students in this course and must NOT be circulated.

1. Networking Overview

• Internet overview/review
  • Chapter 1: Introduction, in Computer Networking: A top down approach featuring the Internet, Addison Wesley, 2004. (The pdf of Chapter 1 is provided here. Of course, you might want to buy the book :-) ). PLEASE DO NOT CIRCULATE!
  • Chapter 3, selected portions from Computer Networking: A top down approach featuring the Internet, Addison Wesley, 2004.
  • Chapter 4, selected portions from Computer Networking: A top down approach featuring the Internet, Addison Wesley, 2004.
  • Chapter 5, selected portions from Computer Networking: A top down approach featuring the Internet, Addison Wesley, 2004.
• On Beyond the Internet: overviews of other network architectures
  • Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN)
    • PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) Fundamentals (IEC tutorial). Not great, but it's the best around :-( Take a look at SS7 signaling (below) when you read this.
  • ATM Internetworking
    • Anthony Alles, "Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks," (sections 1-4 only)
    • J. Kurose, K. Ross, ATM, section 5.8 in Computer Networking: A Top Down Approach
  • GSM Cellular Networks
    • "GSM," in Mobile Communications, by J. Schiller (Addison Wesley).

2. Network/Protocol mechanisms

What protocol mechanisms/techniques are commonly found in network protocols and why are they used? Signaling, state management (hard state-versus soft state, separation of control/data), randomization, indirection, multiplexing, virutalization, designs for scale.

2. Signalling and State Management

• SS7: Signalling in the PSTN:
  • A Modarressi, R. Skoog, "Signalling System No. 7: A Tutorial," IEEE Communications Magazine, July 1990.
• Signalling in ATM Networks
  • Q.2931 signaling in ATM networks: Chapter 10: "Call and Connection Control" in ATM Networks, U. Black. (Optional reading: the ITU specification for Q2931: ITU-T Recommendation Q.2931
• Internet Signalling: RSVP and SIP
  • W. Stallings, "The Sesison Initiation Protocol," The Internet Protocol Journal - Volume 6, Number 1
  • J. Kurose, K. Ross, SIP, section 7.4.3 in Computer Networking: A Top Down Approach
  • L. Zhang, S. Deering, D. Estrin, S. Shenker, and D. Zappala, "RSVP: A New Resource ReSerVation Protocol," IEEE Network, September 1993.
    
• Signalling: Hard state versus soft state
  • Sections I and II in P. Ji, Z. Ge, J. Kurose, D. Towsley, “A Comparison of Hard-state and Soft-state Signaling Protocols,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. Volume 15, No. 2 (April 2007), pp. 281 – 294.
  • Sections 1 and 2 in John Lui, Vishal Misra and Dan Rubenstein, "On the Robustness of Soft State Protocols," 12th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), Berlin, Germany, October, 2004

2.2 Randomizaztion

• Ethernet backoff:  "CSMA/CD: Ethernet's Multiple Access Protocol," Section 5.3.2 in K&R.
• M. Christiansen, K. Jeffay, D. Ott, F. Smith, "Tuning RED for Web Traffic," Proc. ACM Sigcomm '00 (just the description of RED, section 2).
• Floyd, S., and Jacobson, V., "The Synchronization of Periodic Routing Messages." IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, V.2 N.2, p. 122-136, April 1994. (Skip Section 5)
• A. Legout, G. Urvoy-Keller, P. Michiardi. " Rarest First and Choke Algorithms Are Enough " 2006 Internet Measurement Conference, 2006. Focus on Sections 1 - 3.
• R. Zhang-Shen, N. McKeown, “Designing a Predictable Internet Backbone Network,” HotNets III, San Diego, November 2004.

• Mobile IP, "Mobility at the Network Layer," section 6.5 and 6.6 in K&R.
• I. Stoica, D. Adkins, S. Zhuang, S. Shenker, S. Surana, "Internet Indirection Infrastructure," ACM Sigcomm 2002
• I. Stoica, R. Morris, D. Karger, F. Kaashoek, H. Balakrishnan, "Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications",Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM'01, San Diego, September 2001.
  

2.4 Virtualization: networks over networks

• The internet as an overlay,  "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication", V. Cerf, R. Kahn, IEEE Transactions on Communications, May, 1974, pp. 637-648.
• IP over ATM, "IP over ATM: Classical IP, NHRP, LANE, MPOA, PAR," J. Xu. (sections 1, 2, 3).
• Virtual LANs, George Varghese et. al, US Patent, 6,560,236. Columns 1-8 only. (I thought you might enjoy reading a patent; this is a readable one).
• VPNs. "Scalability Implications of Virtual Private networks," J. DeClercq, O. Paridaens, IEEE Communications Magazine, May 2002.

2.5 Multiplexing resources: packet-level, burst-level, call-level

• Scheduling and Policing Mechanisms, excerpted from chaoter 6 in [Kurose, Ross]
• R. Parekh, R. Gallager, "A generalized processor sharing approach to flow control in integrated services networks: the single-node case," IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 1993. (Sections 1 and 2 only)
• Routing in the Telephone Network, sections 11.1 - 11.4 in An Engineering Approach to Computer Networking, S. Keshav, Addison Wesley, 1997. Call-level multiplexing: blocking, trunk reservation

3. Network architecture: the big picture. ; lessons from the Internet (and other networks: ATM, telephony); circuit switching versus packet switching revisited; policy, flexibility, and optimized performance.

• J. Saltzer, D. Reed, D. Clark: "End-to-End arguments in System Design" ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS),
  Volume 2 , Issue 4 (November 1984)
• D. Clark: "The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols", Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM '88, August, 1988.
• D.P. Reed, J.H. Saltzer, D. Clark ,  Active Networking and End-To-End Arguments ,IEEE Network Magazine, 1998
• P. Molinero-Fernadez, N. McKeown, H. Zhang, "Is IP going to take over the world?," ACM HotNets 2002.
• Optional readings: (an easy read, but lots to think about):
  • M Blumenthal, D. Clark, "Rethinking the design of the Internet: The end to end arguments vs. the brave new world" ACM Trans. on Internet Technology
  • D. Isenberg, The Rise of the Stupid Network, Computer Telephony, August 1997, pg 16-26.
  • J.B.S. Haldane, "On Being the Right Size," 1928.

4. Protocol Implementation. Protocol implementation principles, with case studies.

• "15 Implementation Principles," draft chapter from G. Varghese
• Code walk through. BSD source code and commentary from TCP IP Illustrated, Vol. 2, W. Stevens, Addison-Wesley
  • Handout (part1, part2): Overview, Ethernet IP, UDP, socket layer

5. Simulation. Principles of discrete event simulation, analysis of simulation output, simulation pitfalls.

• Discete Event Simulation Program (code walkthrough)
• Introduction to simulation. Chapters 24 and 25 in The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis, R. Jain, Wiley 1992
• Confidence Intervals, S. Waner, from Finite Mathematics and Applied Calculus (online).
• ns tutorials:
•  the most official tutorial from the ns www site: http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/tutorial/index.html
• ns by example: http://nile.wpi.edu/NS/
• ns-2 tcl program that we cover in class (with execution trace and with line numbers).  Here is the tcl file (only) with no line numbers

6. Optimization-based routing and congestion control

• R.G. Gallager. " A minimum delay routing algorithm using distributed computation", IEEE Transactions on Communications, Jan 1977, pp. 73-85.
• Steven Low, "Optimization Based Congestion Control for the Internet" (only up through section 3.2)
• Jiayue He, Ma’ayan Bresler, Mung Chiang, and Jennifer Rexford, " Towards Robust Multi-layer Traffic Engineering:," IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, June 2007.