CS 590F: Design of Multi-service Networks

Fall 1999 (Fall 2000 will have a similar style, but different papers and topics)

http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/fahmy/cs590f/

Overview	Objectives	Project Plan and Topics	Useful Links	Researchers Web Pages
Readings	Networking Books	List of Papers	Tutorials	Schedule
Instructor/Office Hours	Prerequisites/Credit	Time/Room	Grading

Overview:

This course gives a brief overview of networking and telecommunication, and then focuses on the latest developments and open research issues. Special emphasis will be given to research areas where there has been a lot of recent activity in the Internet and telecommunication communities. The topics to be covered (tentatively) include:

congestion and flow control (TCP/IP, ECN, ATM),

quality of service and traffic management (including differentiated and integrated services and RSVP, admission and policy control, buffer management, scheduling, and pricing),
multiprotocol label switching,
multicast group management and routing,
reliable multicast,
multimedia applications (including Internet telephony),
wireless network protocols.

Objectives:

Upon completion of this course, the student will grasp the latest networking problems and proposed solutions, and be prepared for a research career in networking.

Each student will choose to either write a survey paper on a topic of his/her choice, or conduct an implementation/simulation research project and write a short report describing it. The students who choose the research project will be more leniently graded. The students will give brief presentations on their survey papers or projects. Students can choose to work alone or in teams of 2-3.

In addition to the project, students will present some of the assigned papers. The presentation should discuss the main ideas of the paper, in addition to pointing out their significance, applications, limitations, and relationship to other work.

Readings:

Assigned from the literature. These will mostly be recent papers in top networking conferences and journals, and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) or ATM Forum documents.

Since one of the main aims of this course is to discuss papers, everyone is expected to read them by their assigned dates and be prepared to discuss them in depth. This means you should read the assigned papers critically and carefully, paying special attention to novel results, potential applications and possible flaws.

List of Papers

Although no textbooks are required, there are a number of useful networking and performance analysis books, most of which you can borrow from my office. I can recommend specific books based upon your background in networking. There are also some good tutorials in my office and online: