CSE 570. Reinventing the Internet

Course Description

The Internet is one of the great technology success stories of the last twenty years. As it has grown, it has been used in ways that the original designers never envisioned and for which the core protocols were never designed. New needs have been met through a variety of ad hoc mechanisms, which have never been integrated into the network architecture, and which, in many cases, violate some of the Internet's central architectural principles. This course will study how the Internet has evolved to meet changing needs and will explore the technical issues that have arisen, as a result of this evolution. It will also explore how the Internet might be restructured to address these issues. The course will be based primarily on published research papers, with reference to standard texts and RFCs for background material.

Administrivia (Fall 2006)

• Time: Monday and Wednesday, 2:30-4:00
• Place: Cupples II, Room 202.
• Instructor: Jon Turner, Bryan 522c, 935-8552.
  .
• Reference: Computer Networking by Kurose and Ross.
• Grading: presentations (20%), critical reviews (20%), short essays (20%), blog contributions (15%), final paper and presentation (25%).

The class will be conducted using a combination of conventional lectures and student-led presentations of selected papers from the research literature. In particular, each Monday class session will involve student presentations of two different papers, and each Wednesday session will involve a lecture from the instructor. The student presentations will be limited to 25 minutes, to allow time for discussion. This means you will need to focus on presenting the most important elements of the paper, rather than presenting every last detail. Student presentations must be mailed to the instructor by 6:00 pm the evening before the presentation. They will be made available on the web site, so that other students can review them before class.

For each of the student-led presentations, several other students will be designated to write critical reviews of the papers. These will be due on the Friday before the paper is to be presented at 6:00 pm, and must be posted as articles to a blog that has been setup for the class. Reviews should be one to two pages long. I suggest you look at the public reviews from recent HotNets conferences and this year's SIGCOMM conference for examples of the kind of reviews I am expecting. However, that I advise you not to read online reviews of any paper that you will be reviewing yourself.

The papers that will be used for the student presentations are listed at the bottom of this page. To sign up to present or review a particular paper, please use this form (there is also a link to the form in the left margin). Each student is expected to give two presentations over the course of the semester (at least one must be before the middle of October) and review six papers (say two per month).

Each week, several students will also prepare short essays on one of several selected topics. Essays should be 3-4 pages long. These are also to be posted to the blog and will be due on Sundays at 6:00 pm. Each student will do three essays over the course of the semester (say one per month). Signups for essays will also be done using the scheduling form.

There will be a final paper due at the end of the semester. This should take the form of a proposal for a novel network architecture or architectural feature. The Hotnets conference is a good source of examples of the kind of work I am looking for here. Each student will also give a short presentation of their final paper. These will be done during finals week.

Students are also expected to post comments to the blog, addressing issues raised in the papers read, the presentations, the reviews, the essays or the comments from other students. Comments to the blog will be evaluated as part of the course grade.

The blog is called Reinventing the Internet. To register on the blog, click on the "Login" link, in the Meta section at the right and then select the "Register" link in the dialog box. Please use your full name as your user name. Once you have registered, you will be able to write articles that will be saved in the blog database and edit them later. You won't be able to post them to actually appear on the blog, but I will do that whenever the deadline for the given review or essay has passed. Your may also post comments to any of the articles on the blog.

In addition to the blog, there is a usenet newsgroup (wu.cse.class.570) that you can access through newsreader.wustl.edu. Please use this for course-specific questions, discussion that is not directly related to the papers, reviews or essays. I will also use it for announcements, so please check it regularly.

Academic integrity. In a course like this, there may be a temptation to "borrow" from existing online sources. Resist such temptations. Instances of plagiarism will be taken very seriously (a failing grade in the course and referral to the academic integrity committee). You may quote others' work if you cite it appropriately, and you may incorporate selected figures from other sources, but only if you cite them.

Lecture Schedule

1. Network Architecture (2 lectures).
   Read K&R (3rd edition) pages 430-476, 314-383, 196-200, 228-253, 146-163, 123-135 and NewArch Final Report and The material from K&R should be review, but I do urge you to read either the pages indicated in K&R or comparable material from other textbooks (Stallings or Peterson/Davie are both fine for this purpose). The K&R page numbers above are from the third edition (the corresponding 1st edition page numbers are: 415-441, 300-341, 207-231, 124-153, 177-182). If you are using another book, the subject material to review is: Ethernet (including hubs, bridges and switches), IP protocols (including IP, ICMP, RIP, OSPF, BGP, TCP, UDP, DNS), operation of IP routers (including lookups and queueing), basic socket programming.
2. Overlays and Network Virtualization (4 lectures).
   Read Globally Distributed Content Delivery, Democratizing content publication with Coral, PlanetLab Architecture, GENI: Design Principles and GENI Conceptual Design.
3. Diversifying the Internet (2 lectures).
   Diversifying the Internet, How to Lease the Internet in Your Spare Time, A Proposed Architecture for the GENI Backbone Platform.
4. Building Metanetworks (2 lectures).
   SANDS: Specialized Active Networking for Distributed Simulation, A DoS limiting Network Architecture.
5. Diversifying the Access (2 lectures).
   
6. Substrate Control Metanet (1 lecture).
   
7. Substrate Routers and Metarouters (2 lectures).
   
8. Metanet Backbone Configuration (1 lecture).
   

Student Presentation Schedule

Essay Schedule

Final Project Schedule