CSE 561: Computer Communication and Networks (Graduate Networking)

CSE Home

Previous Quarters

About Us

Search

Contact Info

Readings and Paper Reviews  Lecture Notes  Homeworks  Project Ideas  Project Presentations  Project Papers  Mailing List  Anonymous Feedback Form

Mondays and Wednesdays, 10:00am-11:20am MGH 234 (status) Instructor: David Wetherall (mail) Office Hours: By appointment. TA: Valentin Razmov (mail) Office Hours: By appointment. Required Textbook: Peterson and Davie, Computer Networks: A Systems Approach, 3rd Ed., Morgan Kaufmann Publishers (now Elsevier). Note that the 3rd edition is relatively new; don't buy the second edition by mistake. Pre-Requisites: The official pre-req is CSE451 or equivalent, implying a familiarity with systems concepts. The course does not assume prior knowledge of the Internet protocols, though this would of course be helpful. There is little in the way of mathematics in the course. Finally, this is a project-based course, so you will likely exercise your programming skills. Mailing List: Please subscribe to the class mailing list. We will use it for updates and clarifications during the quarter. Overview This course has two goals: 1) to help you understand the fundamental ideas and design principles that underlie large-scale, distributed computer networks; and 2) to help you learn how to do networking (or more broadly systems) research. To do so, we will study the Internet, a remarkable engineering triumph by any measure that is rich in experience and lessons. It is one of the few systems of any kind to have successfully scaled in numbers of users by six orders of magnitude while providing continuous service over the past three decades. Yet, surprisingly, the design of the Internet is far from complete. Its everyday operation is poorly understood, it provides a playing ground that is not well-suited for competitive interests, and it is fragile and insecure against frequent disruptions by worms, viruses and denial-of-service attacks. The only certainty is that the Internet will continue to change, and this class is intended to help you understand how and why. The content of the class is relatively broad. We will cover topics including reliability, addressing, routing, naming, congestion and quality of service, evolution, and security.  A key part of the class will be to review and discuss a mix of mostly new and sometimes classic papers. There will also be occasional homework to cover the basics and a take home final to help students synthesize the course material. Critically analyzing papers is intended to let you learn about networking and research at the same time. But the best way to learn how to do research is to do research. Thus a major part of the course will be to split up into small teams to do a networking research project. We will provide a candidate list of topics, and work with teams throughout the quarter on their projects. The end result will be a paper and presentation to the rest of the class at the end of the quarter. Readings In addition to background textbook reading, the course involves reading approximately 20 papers. We will put these papers online for you to print; this has been the student preference in past years. You are required to read the papers before the class in which they are scheduled to be discussed. You must further and submit a written critique of one paper per class for which there is assigned reading. The choice of which paper to review is yours if there is more than one assigned paper. Reviews are submitted through the hypermail system on the class web page, and are due by 8:00am on the scheduled day. This is to give the instructor and the students time to read all reviews before class. Reviews are roughly a half-page (no more than one page!), and should cover all of the following aspects: What is the main result of the paper? (one or two sentence summary) What strengths do you see in this paper? (your review needs have at least one or two positive things to say) What are some key limitations, unproven assumptions, or methodological problems with the work? How could the work be improved? What is its relevance today, or what future work does it suggest? The paper summaries will be graded on a scale of 0-3. You get 0 if you didn't turn in the summary. You get 1 if you turned in a weak summary that didn't convince us that you understood the paper. Most grades are 2's: this is what you get if you clearly read and understood the paper, and had something interesting to say. 3 is reserved for insightful reviews. Projects Your project will be carried out in groups of size two -- find a partner now! -- and we will provide you with initial suggestions. You are free to come up with your own idea for a project. The project will be staged with milestones (much as a normal research effort would be) to help you make progress over the quarter. Each milestone adds some significant element to the paper, and the overall project grade will be based on the quality of the work at each milestone, in addition to the end result.  The milestones are due by email to both the instructor and TA by the end of the given day of the respective week.  Week 2 (Wednesday): Find a partner and choose a topic for your project.. Week 4 (Wednesday): Write an introduction describing the problem and how you plan to approach it (what will you actually do?). Include motivation (why does the problem matter?) and related work (what have others already done about it?). 3 pages total. Week 7 (Monday). Update your paper to include your experimental methodology (how will you test whether what you built or do is any good?) and preliminary results (hint: you should be well underway by now!). 6 pages total. Week 11 (Monday): Turn in your completed paper. These will be made available to the class. 12 pages total. Week 11 (last week of class or TBA): Conference week -- short presentations by all groups. Each team is strongly encouraged to meet with the instructor during the quarter to obtain feedback on specific issues, sharpen the focus of their project, discuss experimental method, etc., and so forth. Final The take home final will be handed out around the last day of class and will be due back by Dec. 16, the day before the end of the final exam period. (This is to allow us to grade on Dec. 17). So that students don't take the entire final exam period to work on it, the exam is designed to take no more than two days. Students may choose any contiguous 48 hour period before the deadline to work on the final on the honor system. Grading Class discussion 15% Paper reviews 15% Homeworks 15% Final (take home) 20% Course project 35% David Wetherall (djw@cs.washington.edu)

	Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington Box 352350 Seattle, WA  98195-2350 (206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX [comments to valentin]