Overview

When the world shut down because of the Coronavirus, the Internet was one technology that kept it humming. We migrated seamlessly from working and studying from our offices and classrooms to conducting those activities from our homes. Few would have predicted the ease with which the Internet accommodated this massive shift. But we didn’t need a global pandemic to tell us how important computer networks are to modern society. Even without it, the number of devices connected to the network has been growing exponentially and is expected to cross 40B by 2025. That is, there will be roughly 5 network-connected devices per person on this planet.

This class will cover the design principles and foundational techniques that underlie large computer networks in general and the Internet in particular. We will discuss how these principles enabled the Internet to withstand a massive shift to the online world and also how some of the most vexing issues around the Internet (e.g., security) can be traced to them.

The class will also cover how computer networks are evolving and learn about the latest technological developments across layers of the networking stack, from hardware to planetary-scale control systems to new applications.

Organization

The class is organized around

Lectures: Taking advantage of the online medium, many lectures will be delivered by experts from around the world.
Papers: We will read classic and recent research papers related to the lecture topic.
Project: You will do a research project in groups of 2-3, since nothing beats doing it yourself.
Quizzes: There will be two quizzes on material covered in the class.

The project will account for 55% of your grade; the quizzes will account for 20%; participation in online discussion will account for 20%; and in-class participation will account for 5%.

There is no required textbook for the class. If you find that you are missing some background material for a paper, consider reading Peterson and Davie or consult the instructor.

Administrivia

Class	MW 3:00-4:20 PM PT All lectures will be conducted via Zoom. Meeting links are on your Canvas calendar.
Instructor	Ratul Mahajan [ratul @ cs.washington.edu] Office hours on Fridays at 3:30 pm
Class mailing list	cse561a_wi21@uw.edu Updated nightly from the official registration list, and uses your UW (not CSE) email address.

You may share anonymous feedback on this course via this tool

Schedule

Finish all readings and post a comment on the discussion board before noon on the day of the class. Read the main papers in detail and skim the "shallow reads."

Date	Reading	Lecturer, slides	Assignments due
Jan 4	Introduction Course overview and logistics.	Slides
Jan 6	Internet design philosophy The Design Philosophy of DARPA Internet Protocols End-to-end Arguments in System Design Shallow reads A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication	Slides
Jan 11	Name and object lookup Section 9.3.1 of Peterson and Davie (Skip if you already know how DNS works) Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications	Slides
Jan 13	Routing Section 3.4 of Peterson and Davie (Skip if you already know distance vector and link state protocols) Chapter 3 of Hari Balakrishnan's notes Shallow reads The revised ARPANet Routing Metric The Stable Paths Problem and Interdomain Routing	Slides
Jan 18	MLK day - No Class
Jan 20	Traffic engineering Achieving High Utilization with Software-Driven WAN Shallow reads Engineering Egress with Edge Fabric Practical network coding Designing a Predictable Internet Backbone Network	Slides	Project pre-proposal
Jan 25	Network-supported resource sharing Analysis and Simulation of a Fair Queuing Algorithm Credit-based flow control for ATM networks Shallow reads Random Early Detection Gateways for Congestion Avoidance	Slides
Jan 27	Cellular networks Scaling Community Cellular Networks with CommunityCellularManager	Kurtis Heimerl (UW) Slides
Feb 1	SDN and virtualization A Clean Slate 4D Approach to Network Control and Management Shallow reads The Road to SDN: An Intellectual History of Programmable Networks Ethane: Taking Control of the Enterprise Network Virtualization in Multi-tenant Datacenters	Bruce Davie Slides	Project proposal
Feb 3	Programmable switches Forwarding metamorphosis: fast programmable match-action processing in hardware for SDN Shallow reads NetCache: Balancing Key-Value Stores with Fast In-Network Caching	Changhoon Kim (Intel) Slides	Quiz 1
Feb 8	Optical switching RotorNet: A Scalable, Low-complexity, Optical Datacenter Network Shallow reads Expanding Across Time to Deliver Bandwidth Efficiency and Low Latency	George Porter (UCSD) Slides
Feb 10	Network diagnosis DETER: Deterministic TCP Replay for Performance Diagnosis Shallow reads Scouts: Improving the Diagnosis Process Through Domain-customized Incident Routing	Minlan Yu (Harvard) Slides
Feb 15	Presidents day - No class
Feb 17	IoT applications FarmBeats: An IoT Platform for Data-Driven Agriculture Towards Low Cost Soil Sensing Using Wi-Fi	Ranveer Chandra (Microsoft) Slides	Project milestone #1
Feb 22	Internet-wide congestion control BBR: Congestion-Based Congestion Control Shallow reads Congestion Avoidance and Control (1988) CUBIC: A New TCP-Friendly High-Speed TCP Variant	Neal Cardwell (Google)
Feb 24	ML systems Learning Scheduling Algorithms for Data Processing Clusters	Mohammad Alizadeh (MIT) Slides
Mar 1	Network verification A General Approach to Network Configuration Verification Shallow reads Blogs at netverify.fun Header Space Analysis: Static Checking for Networks	Slides
Mar 3	Data center congestion control TIMELY: RTT-based Congestion Control for the Datacenter Shallow reads Data Center TCP (DCTCP) Congestion Control for Large-Scale RDMA Deployments Swift: Delay is Simple and Effective for Congestion Control in the Datacenter	Jitu Padhye (Microsoft) Slides	Project milestone #2
Mar 8	Named data networking A Brief Introduction to Named Data Networking An Overview of Security Support in Named Data Networking Shallow views NDN - Why Bother New Way to look at Networking	Lixia Zhang (UCLA)
Mar 10	Topology design Understanding lifecycle management complexity of data center topologies Shallow reads Jupiter Rising: A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google’s Datacenter Network Beyond the mega-data center: networking multi-data center regions Condor: Better Topologies Through Declarative Design	Radhika Niranjan Mysore (VMware) Slides	Quiz 2
Mar 18	Finals week		Project final