CSL858, Winter 2011: Advanced Computer Networks

Introduction

We will go beyond what we studied in CSL 374 to explore in detail some fundamental aspects of computer networks and current research areas. Computer networks is one of the most interesting fields of computer science because it has heavy components of both theory and practice. There are certain topics where theory has preceded its application, but lots others where economics or pragmatic urgency or Moore's Law has set the direction for technology development, leaving the science to catch up much later. Throughout the course, we will examine current research and its impact in this broader context. Students will learn in detail some fundamental concepts of networks, basic theoretical tools, get a peep into current research topics, and broadly understand how research problems are identified, addressed, and sometimes are able to find their way to deployment. Our emphasis on wireless networks will be low because another course is being offered in parallel.

Readings and outline

[L] indicates a lecture, [P] indicates a student presentation, [O] indicates optional (depending on time)

Paper review website

Project ideas

• Core networks
  • Write a passive monitoring tool for bandwidth and link analysis. The tool can monitor incoming and outgoing packets, attach flags such as record route options in IP packets, send pings, etc, but should consume minimal bandwidth itself
  • Write a link profiler which infers properties of the access link, and accordingly sets parameters on some open-source link emulation tool
  • Write an extremely easy-to-use tool for photo and video upload over a flaky Internet connection in rural areas. Think about using layered codecs so that a poor-resolution upload can be done immediately over MMS for example, while higher-resolution uploads follows later over GPRS or DSL or VSAT links. As a second step, publish the content on Facebook and build an application which allows users to leave voice-based comments on the content.
  • Collect logs from the IIT proxy and analyze its caching effectiveness. Improve the effectiveness by caching streaming content.
  • Set up a CDN or a P2P VoD service on campus. Write a Firefox or Chrome plugin to use the infrastructure through the browser, especially for streaming video such as through YouTube. Study its performance under different link emulation and content distribution scenarios
  • Write a Facebook application for an iPhone or Android or Symbian client, which does not upload photos and videos all the way to Facebook, but uses a local CDN for video delivery. Study the performance with different mobility scenarios.
  • On a network of PlanetLab nodes, use DNS to find out the closest Akamai servers. Then study if you can find a pattern to which YouTube or Facebook videos are cached on these servers by fetching a list of recent videos, popular videos, etc from YouTube.
• Application of networks concepts
  • Model the paper trail in the IIT adminstration as a network and analyze its properties
  • Kleinberg XXX
• Applications
  • Write a social network crawler for Twitter, Facebook, etc, which can crawl based on different sampling criteria, and store the network in a distributed database
  • Design a campaign system on Facebook: Content is pushed automatically to a subset of volunteers seeded in different parts of the social network, and then routed to groups to which the volunteers are subscribed. Keep track in real time of content accesses, and learn the efficacy of the volunteers to popularize issues.
• Survey papers
  • Do a history study of the development and popularization of the Ethernet, scheduling and flow control in computer networks, P2P, and other topics. How research built upon other prior work, how extraneous factors influenced the development, which works made it to the real world, etc.
  • Do a survey on intrusion detection systems, prevention of DDoS attacks, bot-nets, etc.
  • Do a survey on the state of the art in data center networking.