Instructor: Spyridon (Spyros) Mastorakis, PKI 175A

Lectures: Monday 4:30PM - 5:45PM (over Zoom), Wednesday 4:30PM - 5:45PM (PKI 278)

Office Hours: Monday 1PM-2PM (over Zoom)

Schedule

Course Overview

Without a doubt, the Internet, as we know it today, has been a tremendous success, expanding our communication frontiers and shaping the future of our society. However, networks still face a number of challenges, including how to achieve secure, scalable, and resilient communication, as well as how to support a variety of application scenarios (e.g., real-time video distribution, autonomous driving, augmented/virtual reality).

This class will cover advanced networking concepts and discuss the transition from the past to the present and the future of networking. The main goal of the class is to help students gain deep understanding of: (i) the rationale of the current Internet design (i.e., why the Internet was designed the way it was designed), (ii) the shortcomings of the current Internet design (i.e., why this design might not be sufficient anymore), and (iii) what are the research directions when it comes to building the Internet of the future. Paradigms, such as cloud and edge computing, and their networking aspects will also be discussed. Finally, we will explore real-world networking paradigms used by big tech companies, such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. In addition to lectures, students will present during class research papers in the broader area of networking, as well as gain hands-on, practical experience with the covered material through a semester project.

Grading

40% Semester project (80% completed tasks + 20% final report)

30% Quizzes on research papers and course material (available and submitted through canvas)

20% Research paper presentation

10% In-class participation

Textbook

There is no textbook required for the course. Lecture material will be made available online following each lecture. However, the textbook: "Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet", James F. Kurose and Keith W. Ross covers networking fundamentals and is a good reference. A free digital copy is available online.

Another good reference is the following textbook: "Computer Networks", Andrew S. Tanenbaum, David J. Wetherall. A digital copy (accessible with UNO credentials) can be found here.

Students are also expected to do their own research online, reading through RFCs, research papers, and other technical documentation.

Presentations of Research Papers

Lecture 3, August 30: D.D. Clark, “The design philosophy of the DARPA Internet protocols”, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 1988

Lecture 5, September 8: P. Mockapetris, K. Dunlap, "Development of Domain Name System", ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 1988

Lecture 7, September 15: David L. Mills, “Internet Time Synchronization: the Network Time Protocol" , IEEE Transactions on Communications, 1991

Lecture 9, September 22: L. Zhang, et al., “Named Data Networking”, ACM SIGCOMM CCR, 2014

Lecture 12, October 4: B. Cohen, “Incentives build robustness in BitTorrent”, Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer systems, 2003

Lecture 14, October 13: J. Dilley, et al., “Globally distributed content delivery”, IEEE Internet Computing, 6(5), pp. 50-58, 2002

Lecture 16, October 25: N. McKeown, et al. "OpenFlow: enabling innovation in campus networks." ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2008

Lecture 18, November 1: M. Armbrust, et al., "A view of cloud computing", Communications of the ACM, 53(4), 2010

Lecture 21, November 10: W. Shi, et al., “Edge computing: Vision and challenges”, IEEE Internet of Things, 2016

Lecture 23, November 17: S. Ratnasamy, et al., "A scalable content-addressable network", ACM SIGCOMM, 2001

Lecture 24, November 22: W. Shang, et al., "Named Data Networking of Things", IEEE IoTDI, 2016

Lecture 24, November 22: S. Triukose, et al, "Measuring a Commercial Content Delivery Network", WWW, 2011

Quizzes

Quizzes will become available online (on canvas) following the lecture on a particular topic and the presentation of a research paper related to this topic. Students will have a bit more than 24 hours to work on each quiz and submit their responses online as well (through canvas). For example, the first topic we will cover is the TCP/IP architecture. The lecture on this topic according to our schedule will be on August 25 and the relevant paper presentation will be on August 30. The quiz on that topic will become available on August 30 (10:00PM) and its submission deadline will be August 31 (11:59PM).

Semester Project

Ideally, semester projects will be done in groups of 2 students. In case that creating a group of 2 students is not possible, please contact the instructor. Semester projects will consist of research and implementation components. The instructor will make a list of proposed projects available. Students are also welcome to coordinate with the instructor and propose their own topics of interest. The topics should be in the broader area of communications, networking, network and systems security.

Course Policies

• No late project submissions.

• The instructor reserves the right to change the course material or schedule as necessary.

• By enrolling for this course, students agree to abide by UNO's student code of conduct, including rules on academic dishonesty, plagiarism, and impermissible collaboration, as well as all other rules and regulations.

Acknowledgements

Course content and structure, including lectures and this website, were inspired by the following courses:

• UCLA CS217A: Internet Architecture and Protocols, Professor Lixia Zhang

• UCLA CS188: Distributed Systems, Professor Ravi Netravali