Principles of Communications

Course Notes and Slides (PDF One Up) and blog of where we are up to now. Some sample problems

See Moodle links to videos - should be there shortly after each lecture. (look under "Panopto" to the right of the Moodle page materials).

Sequence/slides/related papers

1. Introduction to what I'm going to say
2. Routes -- how to "get" 'there' for some definitions of "get" and 'there'

Routes Addenda:

• BGP from MIT
• Cloudflare blog about fb outage
• Asynch Convergence of bellman-ford routing paper if you are interested in following up on recent research here on topic.
• The internet is flattening
• DEFO is SDN+optimisation, to compare with Fibbing.
• Further reading on Dynamic Adaptive Routingincludes max flow problem plus the chances of finding working triangle problem
3. Flow - slow down (ECN would be good - see ToS field in IPv4 or IPv6); RR would be good
   Flow addendum: n.b. control theory was not covered in videos, and so is non-examinable this year. Other thnigs of interest:-
   • how netflix do their CDN in practice
4. Schedules - beyond fifo

   Background: priority in handling of packets in QUIC is a very nice example of the impact of scheudling on protocol performance/behaviour! Take care though as it can have performance implications

   • Original GPS paper for details on processor sharing model
   • CoDel is a practical home router implementation, and has a fair queuing variant
   • TCP in the Wild - in reality
5. Data Centers - revisiting integrated services
   • additional material on qjump and data centers which links to configuration&source!
6. Optimisation - of user & network, together: also see on which this is based. Further reading would be chapter 5 of Bertsekas&Gallagher's Data networks book.
   • TE for elastic traffic background paper
7. Traffic economics
8. Systems structures
9. Summary of what I said

Last year’s course materials are still available.