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Time	:	TuTh 12:30pm - 1:50pm
Location	:	GFS 118
Instructor	:	Bill Cheng, Office Hours: TuTh 10:00am - 11:00am in SAL 228, E-mail: <bill.cheng@usc.edu> or <william@bourbon.usc.edu>   (Please do not send HTML-only e-mails. They will not be read.)
TA	:	Jinyong Lee, E-mail: <jinyongl@usc.edu>, Office Hours: Tue, 2:00pm - 4:00pm in HNB 10
Grader	:	Hideaki Katagishi, E-mail: <katagish@usc.edu>, (The grader will hold office hours the week after the announcement of each project assignment's grades.)
Midterm Exam	:	during class time in MHP 106, Tue, 3/11/2008 (firm) (MHP is located in section D7 of the campus map)
Final Exam	:	2pm-4pm, Wed, 5/14/2008, in MHP 106 (firm)
Msg Archives	:	messages from Bill, messages from Jinyong, messages from Hideaki

Description	:	textbooks, topics covered, grading policies, additional resources, etc.
Papers	:	required and recommanded technical papers.
Lectures	:	slides from lectures in HTML, PostScript, and PDF formats.
Homeworks	:	(2-4 homeworks will be assigned.)
Projects	:	(please also see important information about the class projects below.)
Moodle	:	social forum can be used for students-to-students discussions about assignments.

• 5/1/2008: The final exam will be closed book, closed notes, and closed everything (and no "cheat sheet"). Also, no calculators, cell phones, or any electronic gadgets are allowed. Please bring a photo ID. Your ID will be collected at the beginning of the exam and will be returned to you when you turn in your exam. There will be assigned seating.

  The final exam will cover everything after the midterm exam (starting at slide 1 of lecture 15 on 3/6/2008) to the last slide of the lecture on 5/1/2008. It will also include the last 5 slides of lecture 13 (on RTT and RTO). For the DEC-bit paper [Ramakrishnan90a], you will only be responsible for the queue management (DEC-bit) part of it.

  Here is a quick summary of the topics covered (not all topics covered are listed):

  • TCP
    • Congestion control mechanisms [Jacobson88a]
      • slow start
      • congestion avoidance
      • fast retransmit
    • TCP Tahoe, Reno, New Reno, TCP SACK [Fall96a]
      • fast recovery
      • New Reno partial ACK
      • TCP SACK
    • TCP Security and performance issues
      • SYN floods
      • SMURF attacks
      • high bandwidth-delay networks
  • Queue management
    • Fair queueing & weighted fair queueing [Demers89a]
      • arrival time
      • start time
      • finish time
    • DEC-bit [Ramakrishnan90a]
      • queue length
      • fairness
      • power
      • efficiency
    • RED [Floyd93a]
      • random drop
      • threasholds
    • TCP throughput [Padhye98a]
      • bandwidth relationship with loss probabilities, segment size, and RTT
      • triple-dupack period
      • timeouts and limited advertised receiver window size
    • TCP friendliness [Floyd99b]
      • bandwidth equation
      • UDP
  • Peer-to-peer/Distributed Hash Table
    • Freenet [Clarke02a]
      • unstructured DHT system
      • insertion
      • search
    • Chord [Stoica01a]
      • structured DHT system
      • finger table
      • insertion
      • search
    • BitTorent [Yang04a]
      • piece selection
      • fairness
  • Integrated & Differentiated Services
    • Integrated and differentiated services design issues [Shenker95a]
      • efficacy
    • Integrated services [Clark92a]
      • guaranteed, predicted, and best effort services
      • token buckets
      • FIFO+
    • Differentiated services [Clark98a]
      • RIO (Red with In or Out)
    • Differentiated services [Nichols99a]
      • premium, assured, and best effort services
      • two-bit diff-serv
      • border router profile meters
  • Measurements
    • Network performance measurements [Paxson99b]
      • pathologies (reordering, duplication, corruption)
      • bandwidth (bottleneck BW vs. available BW)
      • loss (predictive?)
      • packet bunch (problems with packet pair)
  • Wireless & Mobile
    • Mobile IP [Johnson96b]
    • Media access for wireless LAN [Bharghavan94a]
      • hidden terminal
      • exposed terminal
      • back-off
    • SNOOP [Balakrishnan95b]
      • operation of snoop
    • Ad hoc routing
    • Sensor network [Intanagonwiwat00a]
      • directed diffusion
      • data-centric communication
  • Multicast
    • IP multicast [Deering88b]
      • composed of a service model, IGMP, and multicast routing protocols
      • MBone and tunnels
    • DVMRP, MOSPF
      • flood and prune in DVMRP
      • receivers floods in MOSPF
    • PIM [Deering96a]
      • shared tree vs. source tree
      • sparse mode vs. dense mode
      • core/center/rendezvous point
    • Single-source Multicast [Holbrook99a]
    • Scalable Reliable Multicast [Floyd97c]
      • sender reliable vs. receiver reliable error detection
      • NACK implosion
      • retransmission
  • Class project
    • Final project

• 3/5/2008: The midterm exam will be closed book, closed notes, and closed everything (and no "cheat sheet"). Also, no calculators, cell phones, or any electronic gadgets are allowed. Please bring a photo ID. Your ID will be collected at the beginning of the exam and will be returned to you when you turn in your exam. There will be assigned seating.

  The midterm exam will cover everything from the beginning of the semester till the end of congestion control (includes materials from part of [Ramakrishnan90a]), i.e., the last slide is slide 30 of lecture 14 on 3/4/2008). I will not ask anything about ns and nam. And you will only be responsible for part of [Ramakrishnan90a] which was covered under TCP congestion control (fairness and efficiency) and not under queue management (DEC-bit). Please note that the last 5 slides of lecture 13 (about RTT and RTO) are also not covered by the midterm exam.

  Here is a quick summary of the topics (not all topics covered are listed):

  • Networking basics
    • CIDR
    • NAT
  • Architecture
    • Internet design issues [Clark88a]
    • End-to-end argument [Saltzer81a]
    • IP (protocol hourglass) [Deering98a]
  • Routing
    • Landmark routing [Tsuchiya88a]
    • Unicast routing
      • static routing
      • distance vector
      • link state
    • Interdomain routing (BGP)
      • BGP messages
      • BGP attributes and policy routing
      • EBGP vs IBGP
      • multihoming
    • Delayed convergence [Labovitz00a]
  • TCP
    • basic TCP mechanisms
      • window-based flow control
      • SYN & 3WH
      • FIN
      • TCP extensions
    • congestion control (includes part of [Ramakrishnan90a])
    • congestion collapse
    • congestion control vs. congestion avoidance
    • fairness
    • efficiency
    • stability

• 2/19/2008: Office hours on Thu, 2/21/2008 has been moved to Thursday, 3:30pm - 4:30pm. Sorry about the inconvenience.

• 2/7/2008: Instructor is out sick today. Office hour and lecture are canceled. Sorry about the inconvenience.

• 2/5/2008: Office hours on Wed, 2/6/2008 has been moved to Thursday, 10:30am - 11:30pm. Sorry about the inconvenience.

• 2/3/2008: Office hours on Monday, 2/4/2008 has been moved one hour ahead to 12:30pm - 1:30pm. Sorry about the inconvenience.

• 1/15/2008: I've fixed the link to the warmup #1 spec late tonight. You should be able to get to the spec now. Sorry about the earlier error.

• 12/19/2007: There is another section of CSCI 551 (on Fridays, 9am-11:50am). It is offered by Prof. John Heidemann. There are substantial differences between our section and the Friday section. Please make sure you attend the section for which you are registered.

• 12/19/2007: Registering with the class mailinglist is required for this class because you must get your port assignments. If you have not done so, please visit the mailinglist page. (You do not have to be registered for the course to register with the class mailinglist.)

• 12/19/2007: Watch this area for important announcements.

• CSci402: Operating Systems.
• EE 450: Introduction to Computer Networks.
• Qualify for a D-clearance. Please read the Placement Exam Instructions and CS Course D-Clearance Info carefully. (Please note that the instructor will not sign anything that says that you do not have to take the Placement Exam.)

If a student signs up late for this class or could not be present at the beginning of the semester, he/she is still required to turn all projects and homeworks on time or he/she will receive a score of 0 for these assignments. No exceptions!