Computer Networking
News
2022-05-30
y2020 p4 q5 (spanning tree with disruption) should be disregarded; it is not a representative for future exam questions. An error in the solution (and question) mean this question is no longer representative.
2022-02-03
All lecture material and Handout3 are now online (Handout3 incorporates Handout2).
A re-recording of Monday (31st of January) lecture is now available through the vle (moodle). (This was necessary as the 31st of Jan lecture had no audio.)
Moodle
Moodle Link This includes a forum for reporting video or permission issues, along with announcements of online sessions.
Slides
Topic 1 Introduction / Foundation pptx pdf Updated: 2022-01-27
Topic 2 Architecture and Internet pptx pdf Updated: 2022-01-27
Topic 3 Physical and Data-Link Layer pptx pdf Updated: 2022-1-27
Slides as 6up pdf Handouts
(Like the pie, handout2 is a lie.)
Textbooks
There are many textbooks; I rather like these:
-
Computer Networks: A Systems Approach
Peterson and Davie
https://book.systemsapproach.org
https://github.com/SystemsApproach/book
- Computer Networking : Principles, Protocols and Practice
Olivier Bonaventure (and friends)
Supervision Handouts
-
Supervison Questions PDF
These are rather old, planned updates have not occured yet. Sorry.
Topic-specific material
Topic 1 - Foundation (Introduction)
- How long is a nanosecond? Grace Hooper on YouTube
- Grace Hopper on Letterman via dailymotion
- As mentioned in lecture 2 - Gibbens,Kelly/Key Dynamic Alternative Routing Frank's page here
- Travelling waves on the motorway here, here and here
- Hark Handley's Satellite videos speculating on SpaceX's deployment YouTube
Topic 2 - Foundations and Architecture
- End-to-End Arguments in System Design, Saltzer, J., Reed, D., and Clark, D.D., Second International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (April 1981) pages 509-512, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 1984, Vol. 2, No. 4, November, pp. 277-288 PDF
- Andrew D. Birrell and Bruce Jay Nelson, "Implementing remote procedure calls", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 2(1), 1984, (ACM PDF)
- David Tennenhouse, "Layered Multiplexing Considered Harmful", Protocols for High-Speed Networks, Rudin and Williamson (Editors), NorthHolland, Amsterdam, 1989 (Citeseerx PDF)
- An xkcd OSI joke cartoon Modern OSI Model
Topic 3 - Data-Link (Media Access) and Physical
- R Metcalfe and D Boggs, "Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks", ACM Computer Systems, 1976. (PDF)
- Hedey Lamarr (co-inventor of Code-Division Multiple Access) Google doodle here
- Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age - book mentioned 2020-2-5 here
Topic 4 - Networks (warning some silliness)
- A detailed discussion of how BGP mistakes lead to YouTube hijacking Hijacking the Internet
- IPv4 address space is virtually exhausted..... news at 11; lecture material around Topic 4. This web page points to many of the "the Internet is about to end.... Doom I tell you....." gadgets and pages on the Internet.
-
The Day The Routers Died... from RIPE 55 network operators meetings in 2007. - Internet Kill Switch
- IPv6 is still broken, or missing, in most vendors' consumer network gear
- A Few of my favorite things Delightful video by the people at CAIDA while fabulously dated, the issues of bad decisions, bad law and the simple wonder of the Internet carry on.
- Sally Floyd and Van Jacobson. 1993. The synchronization of periodic routing messages. In Conference proceedings on Communications architectures, protocols and applications (SIGCOMM '93). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 33-44. (PDF)
- Vern Paxson and Sally Floyd, "Wide-Area Traffic: The Failure of Poisson Modeling", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 3(3), 1995 (PDF)
- A comparison of different VPN security protocols here
Topic 5 - Transport
Questions came up about TCP flow-control, here are some links to help. The first is an excellent hands-on examination using wireshark.
Sadly, none of these show clearly the behaviour for TCP RcvWindow when some packets are received out of order.
- Brian Sorti's TCP flow control (example in GO)
- a demo that shows the relationship between application and TCP buffer
- Cute little annotated animation
- Following on from How do we size buffers in the Internet? Jim Getty'sBuffer Bloat page. Buffer bloat project page.
- Tom Edsall Interview "Talking about switches" from the Stanford CS144 course Fall 2014 youtube
- relevant to both Topic 4 (buffers) and Topic 5 (windowing ARQ algorithms) TCP-window movie notes TCP-window movie file (mov format)
- Van Jacobson and Michael J. Karels, "Congestion Avoidance and Control", (ACM DL) slightly revised version of Jacobson, V. Congestion avoidance and control. In Proceedings of SIGCOMM 88 (Stanford, CA, Aug. 1988), ACM.
- TCP algorithms comparison table from wiki space
Topic 6 - Applications
- Varnish is a front-facing cache. Poul-Henning Kamp is it's primary author/architect, he wrote this interesting piece on VM, not specifically relevant for CompNet but certainly relevant to "Systems Thinking" people.
- Tim Berners Lee's machine at CERN
- DNS Measurements at a Root Server
- Speed testing HTTP vs HTTPS
- An excellent demo of both the SPDY (HTTP/2) standard and of the impact of latency upon web stuff here
- Baset et al., "An Analysis of the Skype Peer-to-Peer Internet Telephony Protocol", IEEE INFOCOMM 2006, PDF
- Honda et al., "Is it Still Possible to Extend TCP?", IMC 2011, PDF
Last year’s course materials are still available.