Instructor Information:

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

Meeting Information:

Classroom Location: ICS 243 (Campus Map)
Days and Times: Mon., Wed.   5:00pm to 6:20pm
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, a hands-on lab, 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, we will have one advocate and one skeptic. 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 criticize 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

Lab

We will use Stanford's Virtual Network System server to building your own Internet Router. Lab is due on Wed. Jan 24th, 2007.

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 3, Mon., Jan 22, 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 5, Mon., Feb 5, 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 8, Mon., Feb 26, 23:59pm: Each group submits a phase-two interim report, and your working code. The report should not exceed 8 pages.

Week 11, Fri., Mar 23, 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 8 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.

Exams

There will be a take-home midterm and an open book/notes final.

Grading Policy

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

Schedule

Some papers are linked from the ACM digital library. You need to use UCI VPN to access those papers if you are off campus.

Mon Jan 8: How to write a system research paper
Roy Levin and David D. Redell, An evaluation of the ninth SOSP submissions -or- How (and how not) to write a good systems paper, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review 17(3):35-40, July, 1983. Craig Partridge, How to Increase the Chances Your Paper is Accepted at ACM SIGCOMM Mark Allman, A Referee's Plea, 2001 Alan Snyder, How to get your paper accepted at OOPSLA, OOPSLA '91 Proceedings, pp. 359-363. Ralph Johnson et al, How to get a paper accepted at OOPSLA, Panel at OOPSLA'93, pp 429-436. William Pugh. Advice to Authors of Extended Abstracts More resources
Wed Jan 10: End-to-end argument (A: Wiyada; S: Jean)
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] David Isenberg, The Dawn of the Stupid Network
Mon Jan 15: No class (school holiday)
Wed Jan 17: Internetworking: design (A: Jean; S: Wiyada)
V.G. Cerf and R.E. Kahn, A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection, IEEE Transactions on Communications, 22(5):637-48, May 1974.
Mon Jan 22: Internet Design Philosophy (A: Mish; S: Ang)
David Clark, The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols, SIGCOMM 1988. David Clark and David Tennenhouse, Architectural considerations for a new generation of protocols, ACM SIGCOMM 1990
Wed Jan 24: No class (Lab due 11:59pm)
Mon. Jan 29: Intra-domain Routing: IP fast reroute (Guest Lecture by Pierre Francois)
Background: IP Fast Reroute: Overview and Things We Are Struggling to Solve IP Fast ReRoute Technologies P. Francois, O. Bonaventure, Avoiding transient loops during IGP convergence IEEE INFOCOM 2005
Wed Jan 31: Routing deflections (A: Dan; S: Michael)
Xiaowei Yang and David Wetherall, Source Selectable Path Diversity via Routing Deflections, SIGCOMM 2006
Mon Feb 5: Congestion control: TCP and AIMD (A: Luv; S: Mish)
V. Jacobson, Congestion avoidance and control, ACM SIGCOMM 1988 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.
Wed Feb 7: Explicit Congestion Control (A: Sulagna; S: Ang)
Background The Addition of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP (RFC 3168) Dina Katabi, Mark Handley, and Chalrie Rohrs, Congestion Control for High Bandwidth-Delay Product Networks, ACM Sigcomm 2002. Yong Xia et al, One More Bit Is Enough, ACM SIGCOMM 2005
Mon Feb 12: Congestion Control Without Reliability (A: Ang; S: Dan)
Eddie Kohler, Mark Handley, and Sally Floyd. Designing DCCP: Congestion Control Without Reliability Proc. ACM SIGCOMM 2006.
Wed Feb 14: Fair queuing (A: Sulagna; S: Luv)
A. Demers and S. Keshav and S. Shenker. Analysis and simulation of a fair queueing algorithm, ACM SIGCOMM 1989 M. Shreedhar and George Varghese. Efficient fair queueing using deficit round robin. ACM SIGCOMM 1995
Mon Feb 19: No class (school holiday)
Wed Feb 21: Inter-domain routing: delayed BGP convergence (A: Ang; S: Michael)
Background Caesar and Rexford, BGP policies in ISP networks, IEEE Network Magazine, special issue on interdomain routing, November/December 2005. Craig Labovitz et al., Delayed Internet routing convergence, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), Volume 9, Issue 3, June 2001.
Mon Feb 26: BGP security (A: Michael; S: Mish)
Background: Nordstrom et al., Beware of BGP Attacks, ACM CCR, April 2004. Kent et al., Secure Border Gateway Protocol (S-BGP), IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, April 2000 Russ White, Securing BGP Through Secure Origin BGP, The Internet Protocol Journal, September, 2003 Subramanian et al., Listen and Whisper: Security Mechanisms for BGP, NSDI 2004
Wed Feb 28: Anonymous Routing (A: Michael; S: Sulagna)
Goldschlag et al. Hiding Routing Information, Information Hiding, R. Anderson (editor), Springer-Verlag LLNCS 1174, 1996, pp. 137-150. Dingledine et al. Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router, Usenix Security 2004 Katti at al. Slicing the Onion: Anonymous Routing Without PKI, HotNets-IV 2005
Mon Mar 5: Robust Overlay routing (A: Mish; S: Dan)
Andersen et al., Resilient Overlay Networks, SOSP, 2001 Gummadi et al., Improving the Reliability of Internet Paths with One-hop Source Routing, OSDI, 2004.
Wed Mar 7: P2P Networks (A: Luv; S: Dan)
Background: Bram Cohen, Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent Michael Piatek et al.Do incentives build robustness in BitTorrent?
Mon Mar 12: Naming (A: Wiyada; S: Jean)
Background: Mockapetris et al., Development of the Domain Name System ACM SIGCOMM, 1988 Pappas et al., Impact of Configuration Errors on DNS Robustness, ACM SIGCOMM, 2004. Balakrishnan et al., A Layered Naming Architecture for the Internet, ACM SIGCOMM 2004 Pappas et al., A Comparative Study of the DNS Design with DHT-Based Alternatives, IEEE INFOCOM, 2006.
Wed Mar 14: Internetworking: evolution (A: Jean; S: Wiyada)
David D. Clark et al. Tussle in cyberspace: defining tomorrow's Internet, SIGCOMM 2002. Ratnasamy et al, Towards an Evolvable Internet Architecture, In ACM SIGCOMM 2005