These tutorials are full-day tutorials (9:00 am to 5:00 pm).
Anthony S. Acampora, Columbia University
This course is intended for systems engineers, hardware and software designers, R&D managers, and market planners who seek an understanding of broadband ATM networks for integrating voice, data, image, and video. It is also intended for engineers who are currently active or anticipate future involvement in the field of broadband networks.
Dr. Acampora is professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University \ and Director of the Center for Telecommunications Research, a national engineering research center. He joined the faculty at Columbia in 1988 following a 20-year career at AT&T Bell Laboratories, most of which was spent in basic research where his interests included radio and satellite communications, local and metropolitan area networks, packet switching, wireless access systems and lightwave networks. His most recent position at Bell Labs was Director of the Transmission Technology Laboratory. At Columbia, Dr. Acampora is involved in research and education programs concerning broadband networks, wireless access networks, network management, optical networks, and multimedia applications. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and is a Fellow of the IEEE and a former member of the IEEE Communication Society Board of Governors. Professor Acampora is author of the textbook: An Introduction to Broadband Networks: LANs, MANs, ATM, B-ISDN, and Optical Networks for Integrated Multimedia Telecommunications (Plenum Press, 1994).
Driven by the proliferation of high speed local data networking and the potential for new multimedia service offerings, broadband networks have become the focus of research, development, standardization, and deployment activities worldwide. A central, defining element of such networks is the Asynchronous Transfer Mode, and ATM is at the core of this short course offering.
Covered are the ATM Adaptation Layers, Local and Wide Area ATM Networks, alternative ATM switch architectures, and traffic-related management and control strategies. Quality-of-service metrics are defined and the concepts of equivalent capacity, traffic descriptors, admission control, and rate enforcement are introduced. Newly emerging concepts including scalable wide-area ATM lightwave networks and ATM wireless access via microcellular radio are also discussed. Finally, descriptions of several broadband field experiments and end-user applications are presented.
David D. Clark, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
This tutorial is intended for network researchers and developers who would like to gain some understanding and insight into the problem of designing and implementing real network protocols. The tutorial will present practical observations on real systems, as well as relating these to current research results.
Dr. Clark graduated from Swarthmore College in 1966, and received his PhD from MIT in 1973. He has worked since then at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, where he is currently a Senior Research Scientist. After receiving his PhD, he worked on the early stages of the ARPAnet, and managed the development of one of the first host implementations of the ARPA network protocols. Following this effort, he worked on local area network technology, and was one of the developers of the token ring LAN. Since the mid 70s, Dr. Clark has been involved in the development of the Internet. From 1981-1989 he acted as Chief Protocol Architect in this development, and chaired the Internet Activities Board, a steering committee that attempts to guide the evolution of TCP/IP as it has entered the commercial world. His current research interests include protocols and architectures for very large and very high speed networks. Specific activities include the development of methods to support real-time traffic in the Internet, and new models of network service to support distributed information systems.
Dr. Clark is a recipient of the ACM SIGCOMM Award. He is widely known for his insight into protocol design and performance and for his skill in identifying and eliminating myths about protocol implementation and performance.
In practice, it is often very difficult to obtain the expected performance from a network or protocol implementation. The objective of this tutorial is to provide ``real world'' advice on how protocols should be designed and implemented so that various performance problems can be avoided. Examples from the Internet (TCP/IP) protocol suite will be used to illustrate various critical performance issues. The presentation will also include examples of various performance problems and how they may be detected and recognized. A simple but revealing visualization method will be used to show real protocol performance issues.
Many of the performance problems we encounter in practice derive from current implementation issues - very pragmatic problems such as the operating system. Theoretically, these are not compelling problems, but they are very real. At the same time, there are in fact very relevant fundamental limits to performance - limits that we are actually approaching today. This tutorial will discuss both the fundamental and the pragmatic limits to achievable performance. The tutorial will conclude with some speculations on what performance we can expect from the networks of tomorrow.
David J. Goodman, Rutgers University
This is an introduction to the rapidly expanding technologies for Personal Communications. It will be useful to people with backgrounds in telecommunications and computers who would like to get involved in research, equipment development, and information services. The tutorial will also be helpful to specialists in one area who would like to get a view of ``the big picture''.
David J. Goodman is Director of WINLAB at Rutgers University , the State University of New Jersey. WINLAB is the National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Wireless Information Networks. Before joining Rutgers in 1988 as Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Dr. Goodman was Head of the Communications Methods Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories . His contributions include innovations in wireless networks, speech coding and digital signal processing. Dr. Goodman earned his Ph.D. in 1967 from Imperial College, University of London. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the IEE.
Of all the innovations in the information technology in the 1980's, Personal Computing had the greatest impact. In the 1990's, Personal Communications will be equally as important. Personal computing was technology driven. The technical community found a way to put computers on desks and eventually found uses for them. By contrast, advances in Personal Communication are pulled by consumer demand, rather than pushed by technological advances. The goal of Personal Communications is easy to articulate and comprehend: send and receive all kinds of information, anywhere, any time. However, it is hard to achieve.
As consumers, we now have access to cellular phones, cordless telephones, and an emerging collection of mobile computing products. To go from where we are to where we want to be requires innovation across a wide range of specialties. Some of the new technologies are related to radio transmission and signal processing. Others have to do with managing information and network resources.
This tutorial describes technology trends in Personal Communications. Taking a top-down systems view, it begins with a discussion of the goals of Personal Communications and the technical challenges to meeting the goals. A major part of the tutorial is an introduction to present and emerging systems for cellular communications, cordless telephony, and mobile computing. Finally, we will discuss the long term future and basic research on the technologies needed to meet the expectations of the next century.
Henry Houh, Chris Lindblad, David Wetherall, and David Tennenhouse, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Computer Science
Users of the Internet, researchers, and system designers. Participants are expected to have some familiarity with browsing the World Wide Web.
David Tennenhouse is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at the MIT, LCS. He is leader of the Telemedia, Networks and Systems (TNS) Group. The group conducts research in gigabit networking, distributed video systems, and information infrastructure.
Chris Lindblad, a postdoctoral associate in the TNS group, is interested in the application of machine intelligence to multimedia and hypermedia. Chris is principal designer of the Vusystem multimedia programming environment. Henry Houh, a doctoral student in the TNS group, conducts research in distributed multimedia systems. Henry has created a national WWW career-planning application used extensively by over a dozen Universities. David Wetherall, a doctoral student in the TNS group, is creator of all of LCS's Active Pages. David conducts research in visual user interfaces and programming environments for multimedia applications.
Chris Lindblad, Henry Houh and David Wetherall are webmasters of the TNS group's highly successful WWW server.
The World Wide Web is an important tool for information organization, access and retrieval, and provides an instant information infrastructure. The use of the WWW has grown tremendously over the past few years. Until the Web appeared, an abundance of electronic information distributed throughout the world was not easily accessible to others. The Web has unlocked this information by providing ease of both publishing and access. Furthermore, advanced techniques allow the Web to be used as instant infrastructure that provides a single interface to a wide range of applications such as catalogs, patent searches, stock quotes, SEC filings, and video clips on demand.
This tutorial surveys current uses, both internal and external, of Web servers for information organization and retrieval. It suggests points of style and design in building user-friendly document trees, and teaches the installation and maintenance of a Web server. Web underpinnings are reviewed including the HTML language and HTTP protocols. This tutorial discusses tools that can be used to automate many web functions and techniques that encourage decentralization and allow users to maintain their own data while making it accessible to the rest of the organization. It also considers advanced issues such as security, scripting and gateways to legacy applications. On completion, attendees should be able to build their own well organized Web server and construct scripts that unlock their organization's on-line information.