Course Structure

The course will meet once a week for 2 continuous sessions (80-minutes per session).

The course will adopt a style that combines four elements:

• Students will watch selected videos (Prof. Feamster's Networking Videos) or read selected items of bibliography on that lecture's topic before coming to class
• The instructor will present the topic using textbook bibliography and/or technical articles
• One or more small (5-10 min) presentations on specific ideas/articles will be presented by students
• The students and the instructor will engage in discussion on the topic

Pre-requisites and Recommended Background

Students should have taken at least an undergraduate-level networking course (EPL324, EPL422) and have basic programming experience in C, Java, or Python.

Bibliography

The course will not follow a specific textbook. Instead, we will utilize a number of sources such as books, surveys, and research papers (listed in the schedule section). You may also find the following textbooks useful for certain parts of the course:

• "Computer Networks, A Systems Approach", Larry Peterson and Bruce Davie, Morgan Kauffman-Elsevier https://book.systemsapproach.org/
• "Computer Networking -- A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet" – Eigth Edition, James F. Kurose and Keith W. Ross, Addison-Wesley.
• “Computer Networks, 5th Edition”, Andrew S Tanenbaum and David Wetherall, Pearson Education, 2011.
• “Computer Networks, An Open Source Approach – International Edition”, Yin-Dar Lin, Ten-Hung Hwang, and Fred Baker, McGraw Hill, 2011

Grading

• 10% Participation and Class Presentations
• 30% Assignments and Lab Exercises
• 30% Group Semester Project
• 30% Comprehensive Final Exam

Assignments for the course will be theoretical exercises, programming assignments, lab-based assignments, and paper summaries.

Participation includes:

• Watching the videos and reading the papers (as determined with in-class quizzes).
• Participating in class discussion.
• Attending class.

The project can be done in groups of two or three, subject to approval of the instructor.

Project

Students will work on a term project in groups of two or three students. The semester project is supposed to be the most creative and fun part of the course. Also, the project will be a "hands-on" study that is related to one or more Internet applications or Network technologies and Protocols. The exact project description will be determined by students themselves. The only requirement is that the project should have a sufficiently challenging component, and it should be relevant to the syllabus of this course.
For instance, you can write a new (or modify an existing open-source) application that is related to the course topics. You can measure or experiment with existing network architectures, evaluating their performance or other characteristics. You can study the user-level satisfaction of a video streaming application. Or, you can propose, study and implement an algorithm that would be useful in one of the applications we cover (for example, an advanced web searching algorithm based on clustering or semantic associations). Writing a survey paper or just running some applications would certainly not be enough.

Important project milestones:

• Topic Selection: Form groups of 2-3 students - email group name, participants (names and email addresses) to the instructor and assistant
• Topic Description: Two-page project description, explaining what you want to do and how you plan to do it. The instructor will provide feedback and you may need to revise your project description.
• Report and Presentation Project writeup (pre-publication draft) and final project presentations

Please watch all videos (Prof. Feamster's Networking Videos) and read all papers before class. The teaching style will be "flipped", so class time will be devoted to discussion and questions.

Videos, assignments, and papers will be posted by the beginning of the corresponding week of class. Assignments will generally be due immediately before the subsequent assignment is released.

Date	Modules	Readings	Slides
Sep. 18	Course Overview Course outline Structure Discussion of possible Projects Introduction A Brief History of the Internet Growing Pains Network Architecture Principles Architectural design principles in Internet Fundamental Design Goal Packet Switching and Narrow Waist Goals: Survivability, Heterogeneity,Distributed Management, What's Missing End-to-end Arguments in System Design (Example: File Transfer) Violations of end-to-end: NAT (Part 1, Part 2)	How to read a paper? As We May Think Internet Histories The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols Future Internet Architecture End-to-end Arguments in System Design The French Connection Machine	Topic 1a Topic 1b
Sep. 25	Switching and bridging Overview Bootstrapping: Connecting Two Hosts ARP Hubs Switches Learning Spanning Trees Overview Example Switches vs. Routers Buffer sizing in switches and routers Overview Buffer Sizing and TCP When Flows are Unsynchronized IP Addressing Background Classful Addressing Address allocation CIDR Longest Prefix Match Multihoming and Aggregation Inbound Traffic Control and LPM IP Forwarding CIDR How LPM Works Lookups and Protocols Finding Long Prefixes Strawman LPM: Exact Match LPM Using Tries Direct Trie Example	Buffer Sizing Lookup Algorithm Taxonomy How CAMs work	Topic 2a
Oct. 2	Internet Routing Overview Intradomain routing Intra-AS Topology Distance Vector Overview Example Poison Reverse RIP Link state Hierarchy Interdomain routing Overview Route Attributes IGP vs. iBGP BGP Route Selection Overview Selection Process Local Preference Multiple Exit Discriminator Interdomain business models Interdomain routing oscillations	Tiered pricing Fast intradomain routing convergence Shedding Light on the Internet: Stakeholders and Network Neutrality A Business Case for ISP Peering. The Art of Peering: The Peering Playbook BGP Policies in ISP Networks Cisco White Paper on BGP4 "Understanding BGP Misconfigurations," Informed Internet routing and Transport On the Interaction between Dynamic Routing in the Native and Overlay Layers	Topic 2b

Laboratory Sessions and Exercises

Laboratory

• Please visit the Laboratory Section on the Blackboard page for specifics

Assignments

Date Announced

Exercise

Date Due

In-class Paper Presentations

Date

Paper

Student

Semester Project

• Project Guidelines
• Project Description Instructions
• List of Topics
• Report Template

Timeline

• 2/10/2024 - Submit Proposal.
• 6/11/2024 - Submit Progress Report
• Last Week of Classes - Final Project Presentations - 20mins/project + 5min Questions.

No.

Project Title

Team

News and Updates

• 4/9/2024 - Website up and running
• There will be no lecture on Sep. 11, 2024. Lectures will commence on Sep. 18.