Advanced Computer Networks

Instructor: Brighten Godfrey
Time: Tuesdays and Thursdays 3:30 - 4:45 pm
Location: 1302 SC
Office hours: Tuesdays 4-5pm (may be rescheduled after 1st week of class)

Communication networks are among the most important and influential global infrastructures that humanity has created. In a list of the top 30 inventions of the last 30 years assembled by the Wharton School at U Penn, the Internet is #1 and six others were possible because of the Internet. This course 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 goal of this course is to provide 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. More than half of the projects from the instructor's course last year have since been published or are in preparation for top venues.

Course materials

Announcements

Schedule

DateTopicReadings and notes
Tue Aug 24 [FB] Course overview and Internet history

No reviews due.

Vannevar Bush. As we may think. Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.

Barry M. Leiner, Vinton G. Cerf, David D. Clark, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, Daniel C. Lynch, Jon Postel, Larry G. Roberts, Stephen Wolff. A brief history of the Internet.

Thu Aug 26 [FB] Grand Challenges in Networking and project ideas None.
Tue Aug 31 [FB] 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 2 [FB] 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 7 [FB] Congestion control

Van Jacobson. Congestion Avoidance and Control. Proc. SIGCOMM 1988, pp. 314-329. Note: You need not read the appendices of this paper.

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. Note typo: on p. 8, in the third line of math, (bI + 1) should be (bI - 1).

Thu Sep 9 [FB] Congestion control

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

Tue Sep 14 [FB] Congestion control: recent perspectives

Bob Briscoe. Flow Rate Fairness: Dismantling a Religion. ACM Computer Communications Review 37(2), pps. 63-74, April 2007.

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

Project proposals due

Thu Sep 16 [FB] Forwarding architectures

Yakov Rekhter, Bruce Davie, Eric Rosen, George Swallow, Dino Farinacci, and Dave Katz. Tag Switching Architecture Overview. 1997.

Sangjin Han, Keon Jang, KyoungSoo Park, and Sue Moon. PacketShader: a GPU-Accelerated Software Router. SIGCOMM 2010.

50-Gb/s IP Router (Partridge, ToN June 1998), RouteBricks (Dobrescu, SOSP 2009)

Tue Sep 21 [FB] Flexible forwarding: Tim Sally

Nick McKeown, Tom Anderson, Hari Balakrishnan, Guru Parulkar, Larry Peterson, Jennifer Rexford, Scott Shenker, and Jonathan Turner. OpenFlow: Enabling Innovation in Campus Networks. White paper, 2008. (See also OpenFlow web site)

Active networks (Wetherall, SOSP 1999), Routing Control Platform (Caesar, NSDI 2005), Operating System for Networks (Gude, CCR, July 2008), ONIX (Koponen, OSDI 2010)

Thu Sep 23 [FB] Naming

Hari Balakrishnan, Karthik Lakshminarayanan, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica, and Michael Walfish. A Layered Naming Architecture for the Internet. SIGCOMM 2004.

UIA (Ford, OSDI 2006), Untangling the Web from DNS (Walfish, SIGCOMM 2005)

Tue Sep 28 [FB] Routing: Sachin Kadloor

Matthew Caesar and Jennifer Rexford. BGP routing policies in ISP networks. IEEE Network Magazine, Nov/Dec 2005.

TeXCP (Kandula, SIGCOMM 2005), NIRA (Yang, ToN 2007)

Thu Sep 30 [FB] Reliability: Ahmed Khurshid

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

Achieving Convergence-Free Routing using Failure-Carrying Packets (Lakshminarayanan, SIGCOMM 2007)

End-to-End Effects (Anderson, 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 5 [FB] Scalability

Scalable routing on flat names (Singla, CoNEXT 2010), or Compact routing (Thorup and Zwick, SPAA 2001) (Pick one of those two papers)

Compact routing (Thorup and Zwick, SPAA 2001), NIRA (Yang, ToN 2007), SEATTLE (Kim, SIGCOMM 2008), ViAggre (Ballani, NSDI 2009)

Thu Oct 7 [FB] Network games and incentives: Wenxuan Zhou

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

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

Tue Oct 12 [FB] Secure routing: Anupam Das

How Secure are Secure Interdomain Routing Protocols? (Goldberg, SIGCOMM 2010)

Survey of BGP security issues (Butler, Proc IEEE, 2010), Prefix Hijacking and Interception (Ballani, SIGCOMM 2007), Pretty Good BGP (Karlin, Computer Networks, 2008), Listen and Whisper (Subramanian, NSDI 2004)

Thu Oct 14 [FB] Spam and DDoS: Jason Croft

Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion (Kanich, CACM 2009)

DDoS Defense by Offense (Walfish, SIGCOMM 2006)

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

Tue Oct 19 [FB] Data center network architectures: Nadia Tkach

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

Helios: A Hybrid Electrical/Optical Switch Architecture for Modular Data Centers (Farrington, SIGCOMM 2010)

PortLand (Mysore, SIGCOMM 2009), BCube (Guo, SIGCOMM 2009), c-Through (Wang, SIGCOMM 2010)

Thu Oct 21 [FB] Data center network services and optimization: Shen Li

Volley: Automated Data Placement for Geo-Distributed Cloud Services (Agarwal, NSDI 2010)

Numerous papers at relevant sessions in NSDI and SIGCOMM 2008-2010

Tue Oct 26 [FB] Project midterm presentations Project midterm presentations due
Thu Oct 28 [FB] Project midterm presentations
Tue Nov 2 [FB] Overlay & peer-to-peer networks: Anjali Sridhar

Resilient Overlay Networks (Anderson, SOSP 2001)

Chord (Stoica, SIGCOMM 2001)

Minimizing Churn (Godfrey, SIGCOMM 2006), Sybil-proof DHT (Lesniewski-Laas, NSDI 2010)

Thu Nov 4 [FB] Overlay & peer-to-peer applications: Igor Svecs Midterm exam released (Due Tuesday Nov 9, 11:59 pm)

Dynamo: Amazon's highly available key-value store (DeCandia, SOSP 2007)

i3 (Stoica, SIGCOMM 2002), OpenDHT (Rhea, SIGCOMM 2005), UIA (Ford, OSDI 2006)

Tue Nov 9 [FB] Content distribution networks: Alex Loeb

Experiences with CoralCDN: A Five-Year Operational View (Freedman, NSDI 2010)

BitTorrent incentives (Levin, SIGCOMM 2008)

Thu Nov 11 [FB] Content-centric networks: Justin Meden

Data-Oriented Network Architecture (Koponen, SIGCOMM 2007)

Networking Named Content (Jacobson, CoNEXT 2009)

Tue Nov 16 [FB] Measurement

Reverse traceroute (Katz-Bassett, NSDI 2010)

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)

Thu Nov 18 [FB] Future Internet architectures

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)

Thanksgiving Vacation
Tue Nov 30 [FB] Wireless networks: Qingxi Li

ZigZag Decoding: Combating Hidden Terminals in Wireless Networks (Gollakota, SIGCOMM 2008)

Efficient Error Estimating Coding (Chen, SIGCOMM 2010)

Thu Dec 2 [FB] Delay/disruption tolerant networks: Xun Gong
Guest Lecture: Robin Kravets

Efficient Routing in Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks: The Single-Copy Case (Spyropoulos, Psounis, and Raghavendra, ToN 2008)

Routing in a Delay Tolerant Network (Jain, SIGCOMM 2004)

Tue Dec 7 [FB] Information flow control and Privacy: John Carlson
Course wrap-up

No required reading

Securing Distributed Systems with Information Flow Control (Zeldovich, NSDI 2008)

Sun Dec 12 Final paper due
Thu Dec 16 Poster session 1:00 - 4:00 p.m., 2405 SC Poster due