CS856 - Advanced Topics in Distributed Systems: Architectural Principles for Large-scale Networks

General Information

The general goal when reading a research paper is to answer the following questions, which will often be necessary to follow references and/or find other work.

• What is the (claimed) problem that the paper addresses?
• What are the (claimed) insufficiencies of other approaches?
• What are the (claimed) benefits of the new approach?
• How are the claims verified? Is the verification sound?
• What are the (admitted) assumptions, restrictions, and drawbacks of the new approach?
• What relevant information (to answer the above questions) is missing in the paper?

General reading material:

• How to Read a Paper by S. Keshav (ACM CCR)
• Internet Clean-Slate Design: What and Why? by A. Feldmann (ACM CCR)
• Top 10 Recommended Readings by various prominent networking researchers (ACM CCR)

Timeline and Reading List

Sep 12 - Organizational Meeting

Sep 18 - Routing

• Paper 1: Resolving Inter-Domain Policy Disputes by C. T. Ee et al. (Sigcomm 2007)
• Paper 2: On Compact Routing for the Internet by D. Krioukov et al. (ACM CCR) - taken

Sep 25 - Protocol Design

• Paper 1: Designing DCCP: Congestion Control Without Reliability by E. Kohler et al. (Sigcomm 2006) - taken
• Paper 2: Structured Streams: a New Transport Abstraction by B. Ford (Sigcomm 2007) - taken

Oct 02 - (no lecture) Fairness

• Paper 1: Flow Rate Fairness: Dismantling a Religion by B. Briscoe (ACM CCR)

Oct 09 - Congestion Control

• Paper 1: Binary Increase Congestion Control for Fast Long-Distance Networks by L. Xu et al. (Infocom 2004) - taken
  Extra Papers
  • CUBIC: A New TCP-Friendly High-Speed TCP Variant by I. Rhee et al. (PFLDNet 2005)
  • Experimental evaluation of Cubic-TCP by D.J. Leith et al. (PFLDNet 2007)
  • Rebuttal to "Experimental evaluation of Cubic-TCP" by Leith et al. by I. Rhee (online doc)
  • FAST TCP: motivation, architecture, algorithms, performance by D.X. Wei et al. (ToN)
• Paper 2: Congestion Control for High Bandwidth-Delay Product Networks by D. Katabi et al. (Sigcomm 2002) - taken
  Extra Papers
  • Policing Congestion Response in an Internetwork using Re-feedback (Sigcomm 2005)

Oct 16 - Proposal Presentations

Oct 23 - Addressing

• Paper 1: Internet Indirection Infrastructure by I. Stoica et al. (Sigcomm 2002) - taken
• Paper 2: How Dynamic are IP Addresses? by Y. Xie et al. (Sigcomm 2007) - taken

Oct 30 - Architecture

• Paper 1: TRIAD: a Scalable Deployable NAT-based Internet Architecture by D. Cheriton et al. (TR)
• Paper 2: A Data-Oriented (and Beyond) Network Architecture by T. Koponen et al. (Sigcomm 2007) - taken

Nov 06 - Reliability and Formal Methods

• Paper 1: Reliability as an Interdomain Service by H. Wang et al. (Sigcomm 2007) - taken
• Paper 2: Declarative Routing: Extensible Routing with Declarative Queries by B.T. Loo (Sigcomm 2005) - taken

Nov 13 - TBA

Nov 20 - Project Presentations

Nov 27 - Project Presentations