Instructor Information:

Xiaowei YANG
Email:
Phone: (949) 824-0139

Meeting Information:

Classroom Location: SSPA 1170 (Campus Map)
Days and Times: Tue Thu   02:00pm to 03:20pm
Office hours: Thu 3:30pm-5:00pm

Overview

This course has three goals: 1) to understand the fundamental principles and theories underlying the design of networks; 2) to understand the methodologies and tools in doing network research; 3) to investigate new ideas in the design, implementation, and analysis of large scale and reliable networks.

To achieve these goals, we will study a variety of networks, with a focus on the Internet, an engineering masterpiece that has transformed our daily life with countless applications it supports, such as email, WWW, and e-commerce. What leads to the tremendous success of the Internet? What are the problems it is facing? How can we make it better? These are the issues we will address. Course materials are drawn mostly from recent research papers. Topics will include network architectures, network resource management, routing, network measurement, modeling, and network attacks and defense mechanisms.

Prerequisite of this course is ICS 243A.

Readings

Each class involves reading one or two papers. You are required to read the papers before you attend the class. (Papers marked as optional are not required.) In addition, you must choose one paper to write a short paper review for each class. Each review cannot exceed one page in 10-point fonts. Your review should cover the following questions:
  1. What are the key contributions of the paper? (e.g., what problems did the authors solve? what new discoveries did the authors make? what novel systems/tools did the authors build?) (1-2 sentences)
  2. What are the key techniques the authors used in the paper? Can you apply them to other studies? (1-3 sentences)
  3. What are the limitations of the paper? (e.g., are there major technical flaws? are the assumptions the authors made realistic? is the evaluation thorough? is the system implemented? are the ideas significant/novel/interesting? are the solutions the authors proposed practical/scalable/robust/secure...?) (1-3 sentences)
  4. Can you propose any improvement and future work? (1-2 sentences)
Each paper review is due in class. Handwritten reviews will not be accepted. Each review will be graded on a scale of 0 to 3 based upon the following criteria:
0: you didnot turn in a review
1: a weak review that doesnot show you understand the paper
2: a review that shows you understood the paper
3: an exceptional good review based on which you can write another paper
If you have taken ICS 243A, and still find the papers difficult to understand, you may find the following textbooks useful:

Projects

The only way of learning how to do research is doing it yourself. In this class, you are required to organize into teams of 2 or 3 people, and carry out a research project in the broad area of networking or distributed systems. I will hand out a list of project ideas in class, but feel free to come up with your own ideas. You should progress according to the following milestones:
Week 2, Thursday, April 14: Find a group and pick a research topic. Include the names of your group members in your paper review for this class.

Week 4, Thursday, April 28: Each group turns in your project proposal in class. The proposal should include an introduction to the problem you plan to solve, the methodologies you plan to take, and related work. The proposal should be no more than 4 pages.

Week 7, Thursday, May 19: Each group turns in an interim report in class. The report should describe any preliminary results you have. The report should be no more than 8 pages.

Week 10, Tuesday & Thursday: Conference week. Each group presents their research. Each presentation is limited to 20 minutes.

Week 10, Friday, June 10: Please upload your paper to the course's DropBox before midnight in postscript or pdf format. It is your responsibility to make sure the paper prints out all right. Each paper cannot exceed 12 pages in 10 point fonts. The margin on each side should be no less than 1 inch. If you use latex, please use the IEEEtran style file.

I will not accept incomplete projects. Please turn in whatever you have before the deadline.

Grading Policy

Class participation: 10%
Paper reviews: 15%
Midterm: 15%
Final: 15%
Project: 45%