Department of Computer Science and Technology

Course pages 2017–18

Network Architectures

This is a paper reading seminar style course - there will be a schedule giving the list of work to read and who is assigned to which paper each week.

There's a great book for background reading to kickoff, by Dave Clark from MIT on network architecture(s) which I highly recomend.

schedule of when you will be speaking, and link to papers you'll be talking about.

Student's speaking assignments are to give a 20-25 minute prepared talk on the paper. I am very happy to discuss paper assignments and talks beforehand. Advice on critical reading/reviewing, writing, presenting a paper is offered in the Research Skills Programme

We'll go through these topics at roughly one per week. There are also guest lectures from experts on their topics.

One thing I'd like readers to bear in mind is that one can take an evolutionary approach to network architecture change, or one can try to be revolutionary. In discussing a given paper, try to see which approach it is taking and whether this supports or undermines the viability of the proposed idea - this notion originated with Constantine Dovrolis and Jenifer Rexford in this nice counterpoint discussion. An important evolutionary refinement is Punctuated Equilibrium: which may be how technology (including networks) evolve really.

A very interesting complex systems/systems bio/eco/evolutionary view on how layered architectures evolve is this paper on Architecture, constraints, and behavior by John C. Doyle and Marie Cseteb.

Forwarding/Addressing & IPv6 & The Internet Architecture for Oct 5 & 10

  • Course Introduction and Lecture 1
  • The Internet Vanilla Architecture 2
  • The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols
  • Radical Alternatives to The Internet Architecture Oct 12

  • All students to prepare a 7 minute talk with 7 bullet points about the two papers, on Haggle and Plutarch here

    Background for Essay 1 for Oct 30

    See Essay 1

    Wireless and Mobile- Oct 17/Oct 19 Lecture & Talk

  • One of you will tackle this paper on fingerprinting Mobile Virtual Operators: Mobile Operator fingerprinting
  • Then I'll cover Connectivity, Mobility and Identifiers : Jon- Background:- - see also IEN 1 which covered some of these ideas in 1977.

    Topology - to Oct 24/Oct 26 Lecture & Talk

  • One of you will cover Alibi Routing
  • Then I will talk about CCN/NDN and related new architecture work @ N4D lab.

    Background for Essay 2 for Nov 27

    See Essay 2

    Transport/End-to-End -- Oct 31/Nov 2

  • I will cover Multipath resource pooling, MPTCP and Coding or Network Coding, MPTCP, Mobile
  • Then One of you can cover Transport Services shims: QUIC and this new IMC paper and SPDY

    Data Centers Nov 7/Nov 9

  • I will cover Qjump
  • Then one of you can cover Microsoft Azure, (see also azure h/w acceleration & pingmesh), versus Facebook and Google

    Cascades and Cross Layer Nov 14/Nov 16

  • I'll cover buzz traq and also
  • the maru project

    IoT & IPv6 Nov 21/23

  • I will cover the Akamai IMC 2015 IPv6 paper then
  • One of you can cover IoT gap analysis

    Enclaves&Containers Nov 28

    And one of you will cover SCONE on 28th

    Background for Essay 3 for Jan 17, 2016

    See Essay 3

    Wrapup tue Nov 28

    What is Network Architecture?

    The Management reserve the right...

    Please advise if you find any missing or incorrect links here to me


    Last year’s course materials are still available.