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). (n.b. recording for 20.10.22 seems to have lost audio/slides so look at last years videos 2021-10-19 2021-10-21 2021-10-26 that cover that material (still consistent with 2022/2023 coursr).

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 this week 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 Routing
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!

   • 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

Viewing recordings

lectures are be presented in LT2 and live streamed on Zoom, and recordings made available shortly afterwards, linked from the Recordings tab above.

Revision

tbd

"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others." -- Groucho Marx
Last year’s course materials are still available.