ICS 243C Advanced Networks

Instructor Information:

Xiaowei YANG
Email: Xiaowei's email
Phone: (949) 824-0139

Meeting Information:

Classroom Location: HICF 100L (Campus Map)
Days and Times: Tue Thu   11:00am to 12:20pm
Office hours: Thu 4pm-5:00pm

Overview

This primary goals of this class are to understand the limitations of the existing Internet protocols and to learn how to design better protocols that overcome these limitations.

The prerequisite of this course is ICS 243A. Students are supposed to have learned the basics of the Internet protocols. We will revisit a number of network protocols, examine the challenges they face in today's Internet, learn the state-of-art proposals to address the challenges, and discuss our own solutions.

The core components of the course are class discussions and a class project. You are required to organize into groups of two or three to prepare for class discussions and to work on the class project.

Readings

Each class involves reading and discussing up to two research papers. (The materials listed under the "Background" section are for you to pick up the background, and will not be discussed.) A goal of each class meeting is to identify the open research issues for that topic, and to discuss possible solutions. You should read the papers and discuss them within your group before you attend the class. For each paper, I'll assign one advocate and one skeptic. The advocate and the skeptic each speaks for up to five minutes about the paper. (You may use at most three slides.) The advocate will present the merits of the paper: what is the problem, why the problem is important/interesting, what are the challenges/assumptions, what are the main results, and why the results are important or better than other competing solutions. The skeptic will try to critize the paper. Everyone else that do not present must post a comment, or question some aspects of the paper, or comment/answer other students' posts on the course discussion board. You must post your entry no later than 8am on the day of the class. Please keep your comments concise and your subject line must indicate the paper you comment on.

If you have taken ICS 243A, and still find the papers difficult to understand, you may find the following textbooks useful:

  • James F. Kurose and Keith W. Ross, Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring The Internet, Third Edition, Addison Wesley [Kurose]
  • Larry L. Peterson, Bruce S. Davie, Computer Networks: A Systems Approach, 3rd Edition, Morgan Kaufmann.
  • Dimitri Bertsekas and Robert Gallager, Data Networks, Second Edition, Prentice Hall

Projects

The best way of learning is by doing. A core part of the course is a research project. 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, Thuesday, April 11, 23:59pm: Find a group and pick a project. Each group uploads one pager that describes the names of your group members and your project.

Week 4, Thursday, April 27, 23:59pm: Each group uploads a phase-one interim report, and your work-in-progress code. The report describes your progress, and should not exceed 4 pages.

Week 7, Thursday, May 18, 23:59pm: Each group submits a phase-two interim report, and your working code. The report should not exceed 8 pages.

Week 10, Friday, June 9: Each group meets with me to discuss and demonstrate their work.

Week 11, Sunday, June 11, 23:59pm: Each group uploads their final report and their final code to the course' DropBox. Report must be in postscript or pdf format. It is your responsibility to make sure the paper prints out all right. Each paper cannot exceed 10 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.

Exams

There will be a number of in-class pop quizes, and a take-home final. You have a total of 48 hours to work on the final. I'll upload the exam to your dropbox at 8am on June 12th, and you must upload your solution before 8am on June 14th. You may not collaborate with anyone on the exam or quizes.

Grading Policy

Discussion board: 20%
Class discussion: 10%
Quiz: 10%
Project: 40%
Final: 20%

Schedule

Tues April 4: End-to-end argument
  1. Jerome H. Saltzer, David P. Reed, David D. Clark, End-To-End Arguments In System Design, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, November 1984.
    • Related link: 1
  2. David Isenberg, The Dawn of the Stupid Network . There is an older version: Rise of the Stupid Network.
Thur April 6: Congestion control: TCP and AIMD
  1. V. Jacobson, Congestion avoidance and control, ACM SIGCOMM 1988. Additional link: A Brief history of TCP.
  2. D.-M. Chiu and R. Jain , Analysis of the Increase and Decrease Algorithms for Congestion Avoidance in Computer Networks, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Vol. 17, 1989, pp. 1-14.
Tues April 11: Explicit Congestion Control
  1. Background: The Addition of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP (RFC 3168)
  2. Dina Katabi, Mark Handley, and Chalrie Rohrs, Congestion Control for High Bandwidth-Delay Product Networks, ACM Sigcomm 2002.
Thur April 13: Variable-structure congestion Control
  1. Yong Xia et al, One More Bit Is Enough, SIGCOMM 2005
Tues April 18: Intra-domain Routing: IP fast reroute
  1. Background:
  2. P. Francois, O. Bonaventure, Avoiding transient loops during IGP convergence IEEE INFOCOM 2005
Thur April 20: Anonymous Routing
  1. Dingledine et al., Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router, Usenix Security 2004
  2. Katti at al., Slicing the Onion: Anonymous Routing Without PKI, HotNets-IV 2005
Tues April 25: Overlay networks
  1. Andersen et al., Resilient Overlay Networks, SOSP, 2001
  2. Gummadi et al., Improving the Reliability of Internet Paths with One-hop Source Routing, OSDI, 2004.
Thur April 27: Distributed Hash Tables
  1. Stoica et al., Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications, ACM SIGCOMM 2001.
Tues May 2: Internetworking: design
  1. V.G. Cerf and R.E. Kahn, A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection, IEEE Transactions on Communications, 22(5):637-48, May 1974.
  2. David Clark, The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols, SIGCOMM 1988.
Thur May 4: Internetworking: evolution
  1. David D. Clark et al. Tussle in cyberspace: defining tomorrow's Internet, SIGCOMM 2002.
  2. Ratnasamy et al, Towards an Evolvable Internet Architecture, In ACM SIGCOMM 2005
Tues May 9: No class
Thur May 11: Inter-domain routing: delayed BGP convergence
  1. Background
  2. Craig Labovitz et al., Delayed Internet routing convergence, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), Volume 9, Issue 3, June 2001.
Tues May 16: BGP security
  1. Subramanian et al., Listen and Whisper: Security Mechanisms for BGP, NSDI 2004
  2. Russ White, Securing BGP Through Secure Origin BGP, The Internet Protocol Journal, September, 2003
  3. Background:
Thur May 18: BGP security
  1. Hu et al., SPV: A Secure Path Vector Scheme for Securing BGP, ACM SIGCOMM 2004
Tues May 23: Naming: DNS
  1. Background:
  2. Pappas et al., Impact of Configuration Errors on DNS Robustness, ACM SIGCOMM, 2004.
Thur May 25: Naming: New directions
  1. Balakrishnan et al., A Layered Naming Architecture for the Internet, ACM SIGCOMM 2004
  2. Optional: Pappas et al., A Comparative Study of the DNS Design with DHT-Based Alternatives, IEEE INFOCOM, 2006.
Tues May 30: Denial of Service Attacks: Traceback and pushback
  1. Background
  2. Snoeren et al., Single-packet IP traceback, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), December 2002.
  3. Optional: Mahajan et al. Controlling high bandwidth aggregates in the network, ACM SIGCOMM CCR, July 2002
Thur June 1: Denial of Service Attacks: Active filters and Capabilities
  1. Yang el al. A Dos-limiting Network Architecture, ACM SIGCOMM 2005
  2. Optional: Katerina Argyraki and David R. Cheriton, Active Internet Traffic Filtering: Real-time Response to Denial-of-service Attacks, USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 2005.
Tues June 6: Email: Reliability
  1. Garriss et al., Re: Reliable Email, NSDI, 2006
  2. Optional: Agarwal et al., SureMail: Notification Overlay for Email Reliability, HotNets-IV, 2005
  3. Background:
Thur June 8: Email: SPAM
  1. Walfish et al., Distributed Quota Enforcement for Spam Control, NSDI, 2006
  2. Optional: Duan et al., Push vs. Pull: Implications of Protocol Design on Controlling Unwanted Traffic, STRUTI, 2005.
Mon June 12th (8am)- Wed June 14th (8am), take-home final