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Department of Computer Science and Technology

Network Architectures

 

Course pages 2021–22

Network Architectures

Lectures happpen on tursdays and thursdays ini FS07 at 3pm. They are recorded via zoom (to view remotely see moodle for zoom link, i plus recordings will be here - missed lecture 5 but recmmend David Tse's Qualcomm lectures e.g. wireless capacity I and II

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. I also recommend this great talk by Scott Shenker on the future for software defined networks - essentially why computer science more than ever has relevance in communications systems.

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.

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.

Interesting reading are the papers in this workshop on the impact of the pandemic on teaching networking

Forwarding/Addressing & IPv6 & The Internet Architecture for Oct 7 & 12

  • 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 14

  • All students to prepare a 7 minute talk with 7 bullet points about the two papers, on Haggle and Plutarch here- well worth reading the Dovrolis paper and paying attention to Evolution v. Revolution as well. See also on concise presentations
  • My responses

    Background for Essay 1 for Nov 8

    See Essay 1

    Wireless and Mobile- Oct 19/Oct 21 Lecture & Talk

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

    See also notes on IPv6 deployment challenges and Tussle in Cyberspace and Survey and Systematization of Secure Device Pairing

    ML and Networks Oct 26/Oct 28

  • Then one of you will discuss evolutionary programming for TCP, or re-enforcement learning for cellular
  • I'll cover Wireless Capacity arguments

    physical considerations for networks also happens in fixed networks, as in this paper on critical regions Impact of Human Mobility on Opportunistic Forwarding Algorithms describes the arbitrary delays you get with the store-carry-forward paradigm!

    Topology - to Nov 2/Nov 4 Lecture & Talk

  • Then One of you will cover Data Center net architectures. See azure h/w acceleration and pingmesh), versus Facebook and Google
  • I will cover Qjump and associated artefacts!

    Background for Essay 2 for Dec 4

    See Essay 2

    Data Centers Nov 9/Nov 11

  • One of you can cover IoT attacks or IoT gap analysis
  • I will talk about CCN/NDN and related new architecture work @ NDN and RMI.

    Transport/End-to-End or Cascades -- Nov 16/Nov 18

  • One of you (tue 1st half) can cover Transport Services shims: QUIC background and this IMC QUIC details paper and SPDY

  • One of you (tue 2nd half) will cover Multipath resource pooling; Network Coding, MPTCP, Mobile

  • Nov 18: Guest slot from Cloud flare on "Addressing Agility Explained: Meaning, impact for operators, and implications for the future public Internet.", by Dr Marwan Fayed/Cloudflare/St Andrews University - see The Ties that un-Bind: Decoupling IP from web services and sockets for robust addressing agility at CDN-scale for some background!

    Cascades and Cross Layer -- Nov 23/Nov 25

  • And One of you (tue 1st half) can look at buzz traq or cascading route failures
  • One of you (tue 2nd half) will talk about SCONE and Maru or maybe Multipath.

  • Nov 25: I'll talk about deployment gotchas: Information Centric Networking, notes on multicast deployment challenges, notes on IPv6 deployment challenges and perhaps my multipath notes.

    Wrap up - Nov 30

    Conclusions

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


    Last year’s course materials are still available.