Computer Networks (CS641)

• Instructor:  Vinay Ribeiro


• Location: TBD


• Time: TBD - Slot TBD


• Course Email List: TBD


• Course Outline: The Internet is arguably the greatest scientific invention of the past 50 years. What started as a defence project catering to a handful of applications with low data rates, has ended up becoming a part and parcel of all our lives, supporting various applications such as Skype, WhatsApp, Youtube, Google search, and even Bitcoin at blazing speeds. Credit for its longevity and success goes to the original Internet design as well as the innovative networking research of the past few decades. In this course we will begin with the orginal Internet design and look at advanced topics at various layers: application (P2P networks), transport (TCP for high throughput and low latency), routing (BGP, high-speed router design), and medium access (802.11n). We will start from the basics before delving deeper into each topic. The grading will be based on programming assignments and two exams.


• Reference Book: Computer Networks -- A Systems Approach, L. L. Peterson and B. S. Davie, Morgan Kaufman, 5th Edition.


• Evaluation (tentative)

  Item	Marks
  Assignments	30
  Mid-Term Exam	30
  Final Exam	40
  Attendance (pending approval)	5
  Total	105

  
  
  
• Attendance Policy (pending approval):
• You get 5 bonus marks if you don't bunk any class. You lose 1 bonus mark for each class bunked. The definition of "bunk" is that a student missed class without a good reason (illness is a good reason).



• Honour Code: Copying of any material verbatim from an Internet source (except for direct quotations or definitions) or from each other is not allowed for any assignment. To have an idea about how seriously plagiarism is treated in the professional community see IEEE's Plagiarism FAQ. Ask for a deadline extension if you need more time instead of copying from various sources.
  
  
• (tentative) Topics and Reading List (search Google Scholar to download papers)
  • Flow and Congestion Control: high-speed TCP, data center TCP
    1. Allman et al.: TCP Congestion Control, RFC 2581, 2001.
    2. Brakmo, Lawrence S., and Larry L. Peterson. "TCP Vegas: End to end congestion avoidance on a global Internet." Selected Areas in Communications, IEEE Journal on 13.8 (1995): 1465-1480.
    3. Floyd, Sally, and Van Jacobson. "Random early detection gateways for congestion avoidance." Networking, IEEE/ACM Transactions on 1.4 (1993): 397-413.
    4. Kumar, Anurag, D. Manjunath, and Joy Kuri. Communication networking: an analytical approach. Elsevier, 2004. (pg. 373-380: A Stochastic Model for a wide-area TCP connection)
    5. Kelly, Tom. "Scalable TCP: Improving performance in highspeed wide area networks." ACM SIGCOMM computer communication Review 33.2 (2003): 83-91.
    6. Floyd, Sally. "HighSpeed TCP for large congestion windows." (2003).
    7. Wei, David X., et al. "FAST TCP: motivation, architecture, algorithms, performance." IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN) 14.6 (2006): 1246-1259.
    8. Ha, Sangtae, Injong Rhee, and Lisong Xu. "CUBIC: a new TCP-friendly high-speed TCP variant." ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review 42.5 (2008): 64-74.
    9. King, Ryan, Richard Baraniuk, and Rudolf Riedi. "TCP-Africa: an adaptive and fair rapid increase rule for scalable TCP." INFOCOM 2005. 24th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Proceedings IEEE. Vol. 3. IEEE, 2005.
    10. Vasudevan et al: Safe and effective fine-grained TCP retransmissions for datacenter communication, SIGCOMM 2009
    11. Alizadeh, Mohammad, Albert Greenberg, David A. Maltz, Jitendra Padhye, Parveen Patel, Balaji Prabhakar, Sudipta Sengupta, and Murari Sridharan. "Data center tcp (dctcp)." ACM SIGCOMM computer communication review 41, no. 4 (2011): 63-74.
  • Internet Architecture: original design, short-comings, suggested solutions
    1. Clark: The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols - SIGCOMM 1988
    2. Stoica et al.: Internet Indirection Infrastructure - SIGCOMM 2002
    3. Balakrishnan et al.: A Layered Naming Architecture for the Internet - SIGCOMM 2004
    4. Jacobson et al: Networking Named Content - CONEXT 2009
  • Modern Routing Technology: high-speed router design
    1. Mckeown: Fast Switched Backplane for a Gigabit Switched Router
    2. Mckkeown: The iSLIP Scheduling Algorithm for Input-Queued Switches - IEEE Trans. on Networking, 1999
    3. Chuang, Shag-Tse, Sundar Iyer, and Nick McKeown. "Practical algorithms for performance guarantees in buffered crossbars." In INFOCOM 2005. 24th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Proceedings IEEE, vol. 2, pp. 981-991. IEEE, 2005.
    
    
  • Assignments (TBD)