CS 396M Advanced Networking Protocols 

Fall 2005   Unique No. 54315

Classroom:  Taylor 3.144   Time:  Friday 2-4:30 p.m.

Instructor: Simon S. Lam   Email: lam at cs.utexas.edu 

Office: Tay 3.112    Hours: Wed 3-4 p.m.

Announcement (12/7/05): Due to UT's closing today at 2 p.m., due date of your term paper is postponed to Friday (12/9/05) for everyone. You should submit a hard copy of your term paper at the beginning of class on Friday.

Please check the lecture schedule re papers to read and to write reviews for each class (Lam's slides).

Course Description

This class covers topics on network protocols that are just beyond the scope of a standard textbook on computer networks.  The prerequisite for this class is Graduate Standing.  (Note that CS 386M is not a prerequisite for this class.)  If you have any question regarding this class, you should talk to the instructor or contact him by email.

Topics to be covered:

  1. Internet Congestion Control
    AIMD extensions, large delay-bandwidth product, explicit congestion notification
  2. Overlay and P2P Networks
    hypercube routing under churn, topology aware construction, QoS, reputation and trust
  3. Network Security
    secure group communications, efficient digital signatures, ad hoc networks, sensor networks, address validity, routing
  4. Host Location Services
    virtual coordinates approach, overlay approach
  5. Tools for Protocol Design
    forward error correction, bloom filter, shared congestion detection, loss measurement, time synchronization
  6. Future Internet Architecture

The emphasis of this class is on network protocol design to address performance, correctness, and security issues.  The topics above are covered by papers in a reading list.  There are two types of papers in the list: (i) core papers (these are older papers that contain fundamental ideas and insights), and (ii) recent papers (these are recent publications selected because they address interesting new issues).  The instructor will lecture to cover many of the core papers.

Grades

A student who takes this class for CR/NC will receive CR if he/she (i) attends at least 75% of the classes (excluding the first class) and submits, at the beginning of each class attended, a one-page review of each paper to be covered  in that class, (ii) participates in class discussions, and (iii) satisfactorily completes assigned class presentations.

A student who takes this class for a letter grade must satisfy the above requirements to receive a passing grade and, additionally, the student is required to write a paper on a research project to be arranged with the instructor.  Your letter grade for the class will be determined by your paper (50%), reviews submitted (20%), class presentations (20%), and discussion participation (10%).

The paper due date is December 7, 2005, Wednesday. Please talk to the instructor about a topic for your project and paper as soon as you can.  Note that this paper must be written only for this class and should not be used to satisfy the requirement of any other class. As a rough guideline, the length of your paper should be 15 pages or longer.