Computer Communications - CSCI 551, Spring 2009, TuTh Section

Time	:	TuTh 12:30pm - 1:50pm
Location	:	GFS 118
Instructor	:	Bill Cheng (for office hours, please see instructor's web page), 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	:	Alix L.H. Chow, E-mail: <lhchow@cs.usc.edu>, Office Hours: Wed 11am - 1pm in SAL 211
Grader	:	Akshat Gupta, E-mail: <akshatgu@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 101, Thu, 3/12/2009 (MHP is located in section 7D of the campus map)
Final Exam	:	in OHE 122, 2-4pm, Wed, 5/13/2009(firm) (OHE is located in section B5 of the campus map)

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.
Projects	:	(please also see important information about the class projects below.)
Participation	:	rules about rowcalls.
Homeworks	:	(2-4 homeworks will be assigned.)
Newsgroup	:	Google Group for discussing course materials and programming assignments. (This group is by invitation only.)

• 5/1/2009: 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 16 on 3/10/2009) to the last slide of the lecture on 4/28/2009 (ns-2 will not be covered). For the DEC-bit paper [Ramakrishnan90a], you will only be responsible for the queue management (DEC-bit) part of it. [BC: added 5/10/2009] For BitTorrent, you will only be responsible for part 1 of lecture 21.

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

  • Queue management
    • DEC-bit [Ramakrishnan90a]
      • congestion notification
      • queue length
      • decision frequency
      • filtering
      • AIMD response
    • 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

• 3/30/2009: Office hours this Wednesday (4/1/09) has been canceled. Sorry about the inconvenience.

• 3/5/2009: 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 Lecture 15 on 3/5/2009 (includes materials from part of [Ramakrishnan90a]). For [Ramakrishnan90a], you will only be responsible for part of it covered under TCP congestion control (fairness and efficiency) and not under queue management (DEC-bit).

  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
    • 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

• 1/1/2009: 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 after the semester starts. (You do not have to be registered for the course to register with the class mailinglist.)

• 1/1/2009: There is another section of CSCI 551 (on Fri 9am-11:50am). It is offered by Prof. John Heidemann. There are substantial differences between the two sections. Please make sure you attend the section for which you are registered.

  If you are a PhD student, you are strongly encouraged to enroll in Prof. Heidemann's section of CSCI 551 (on Fri 9am-11:50am).

• 1/1/2009: 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 carefully. (If you are a new student, please also read New MS Student Info for an explanation of these terms.)

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!