Research in Computer Networks (8803-D)
Spring 2002

Time: TTh 8:05-9:25

Location: Skiles 171

General Information

3-0-3. Prerequisites: CS6250 and Graduate Standing or Consent of the Instructor

This is a research course in computer networks. In this course, we will read and discuss a set of research papers in various areas of networking: security, internetworking, discrete algorithms (e.g., IP lookup algorithms), routing, quality of service, network measurement, multicast, peer-to-peer netowrking and etc. Students are expected to read assigned papers before coming to the class and submit a concise paper summary (e.g., one or two paragraphs). Participation in the class discussion is required (factored into the final grade). There will be two midterm exams covering the papers that have been discussed in the class. Students are also expected to finish a reserach project and deliver a project presentation.

Instructor: Prof. Jun (Jim) Xu

• Office: CCB 119 (shared office) during office hours and GCATT 217otherwise
• Phone: (404)3852168 (for GCATT office) or simply 52168 from a campus phone
• Email: jx@cc.gatech.edu
• Office Hours: 9:30a to 10:30a in CCB 119 or by appointment

Teaching Assistant: Yarong Tang

• Email: yarongt@cc.gatech.edu

Paper Review

• Jan, 15: " The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols", review
• Jan, 15: " End-To-End Arguments In System Design", review
• Jan, 17: " A 50-Gb/s IP Router", review
• Jan, 22: " System Architecture Directions for Networked"
• Jan, 24: " Building Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks with Low-Level Naming"
• Jan, 24: " SPINS: Security Protocols for Sensor Networks"
• Jan, 29: " A Novel Cache Architecture to Support Layer-Four Packet Classification at Memory Access Speeds"
• Jan, 31: " Cost-Effective Flow Table Designs for High-Speed Routers: Architecture and Performance Evaluation"
• Feb, 5: " Network Support for IP Traceback"
• Feb, 5: " Advanced and Authenticated Marking Schemes for IP Traceback"
• Feb, 7: " Scalable High Speed IP Routing Lookups"
• Feb, 7: " Faster IP Lookups using Controlled Prefix Expansion"
• Feb, 12: " Finding Similar Files in a Large File System"
• Feb, 12: " A Protocol-independent Technique for Eliminating Redundant Network Traffic"
• Feb, 14: " Distributed Topology Control for Power Efficient Operation in Multihop Wireless Ad Hoc Networks"
• Feb, 14: " Analysis of a Cone-Based Distributed Topology Control Algorithm for Wireless Multi-hop Networks" (Optional)
• Feb, 19: George H. Forman and John Zahorjan, "The Challenges of Mobile Computing",
                  IEEE Computer 27, 4 (April 1994), pp. 38-47. link2
                  (Earlier version available as Technical Report 93-11-03)
• Feb, 19: Z.J. Haas and B. Liang, "Ad Hoc Location Management Using Quorum Systems",
                  ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking, April 1999 link2
• Feb, 21: P. Johansson, M. Kazantidis, R. Kapoor, and M. Gerla, "Bluetooth: An Enabler for Personal Area Networking",
                  IEEE Networks, pp. 28-37, Sept/Oct 2001 link2
• Feb, 21: L. Zhou and Z.J. Haas, "Securing Ad Hoc Networks",
                  IEEE Network Magazine, vol. 13, no.6, November/December 1999 link2
• Feb, 26: L. Fan, P. Cao, J. Almeida and A. Broder, "Summary Cache: A Scalable Wide-Area Web Cache Sharing Protocol",
                  Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS'98, Vancouver, Canada, pp. 254-265 link2
• Feb, 26: (Optional) J. Wang, "A Survey of Web Caching Scheme for the Internet",
                  ACM Communication Review, Volume 29, Number 5, October 1999. link2
• Feb, 28: Ion Stoica (University of California at Berkeley), Robert Morris, David Karger, Frans Kaashoek, Hari Balakrishnan (MIT),
                  "Chord: A Scalable Peer-To-Peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications",
                  Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM'01, San Diego, CA, pp. 149-160 link2
• Mar, 12: Lecture on security basics ppt file
• Mar, 14: Lecture on security basics(continue)
• Mar, 19: I. Clarke, O. Sandberg, B. Wiley and T. Hong,
                  "Freenet: A distributed anonymous information storage and retrieval system",
                  in Designing Privacy Enhancing Technologies: International Workshop on Design Issues in Anonymity and Unobservability,
                  LNCS 2009, ed. by H. Federrath. Springer: New York (2001). link2 link3
• Mar, 19: (Optional) Ian Clarke, Theodore W. Hong, Scott G. Miller, Oskar Sandberg, and Brandon Wiley,
                  "Protecting Free Expression Online with Freenet",
                  IEEE Internet Computing 6(1), January/February 2002. link2 link3
• Mar, 21: project-demo - 15 minutes each team
• Mar, 26: Class canceled
• Mar, 28: last week's papers on Freenet
• Apr,   2: (The original StackGuard paper) Crispin Cowan, Calton Pu, David Maier, Heather Hinton, Peat Bakke, Steve Beattie,
                  Aaron Grier, Perry Wagle, and Qian Zhang, "Automatic Detection and Prevention of Buffer-Overflow Attacks",
                  in the 7th USENIX Security Symposium, San Antonio, TX, January 1998. link2
• Apr,   4: J.C.R. Bennett and H. Zhang,
                  "WF2Q: Worst-case Fair Weighted Fair Queueing",
                  INFOCOM'96, Mar, 1996.       (presented by lulu)
• Apr,   9: Shreedhar, M. Varghese, George
                  "Efficient fair queuing using deficit round-robin",
                  IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking Vol.4, No. 3 (June 1996), pp. 375-385       (presented by wooyong lee)
• Apr,   11: Alex C. Snoeren (MIT), Craig Partridge, Luis A. Sanchez, Christine E. Jones, Fabrice Tchakountio, Stephen T. Kent, W. Timothy Strayer
                  "Hash-Based IP Traceback ",
                  Proceedings of SIGCOMM 2001, San Diego, CA, USA 2001       (presented by Yarong Tang)
• Apr,   11: Chung Kei Wong, Mohamed Gouda, Simon S. Lam
                  " Secure Group Communications Using Key Graphs ",
                  IEEETNWKG: IEEE/ACM Transactions on NetworkingIEEE Communications Society, IEEE Computer Society and the ACM with its Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM), ACM Press (1998)       (presented by Matthew Hammond)
• Apr,   11: Rita Chen and William Yeager
                  "Poblano: A distributed Trust Model for Peer-to-Peer Networks ",
                  white paper (Sun Microsystems)       (presented by Matthew Hammond)
• Apr,   16: Jonathan Stone, Craig Partridge
                  "When The CRC and TCP Checksum Disagree ",
                  Proceedings of SIGCOMM 2000, Stockholm, Sweden September 2000       (presented by Jianjun Zhang)
• Apr,   16: Charles E. Perkins and Elizabeth M. Royer
                  "Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing ",
                  Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, New Orleans, LA, February 1999, pp. 90-100       (presented by Jianjun Zhang)
• Apr,   18: S. Sikka, G. Varghese
                  "Memory-efficient State Lookups with Fast Updates ",
                  In Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM '00       (presented by Min-Ho Sung)
• Apr,   23: Tzi-Cker Chiueh and Fu-Hau Hsu
                  "RAD: A Compile-time Solution to Buffer Overflow Attacks ",
                  International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), Phoenix, Arizona, USA, April 2001       (presented by Kemin Yang )
• Apr,   23: Arash Baratloo, Navjot Singh and Timothy Tsai
                  "Transparent Run-Time Defense Against Stack Smashing Attacks ",
                        (presented by Kemin Yang )

Related Readings (reference only)

• Similar courses offered in other universities
  1. EECS 589: Advanced Computer Networks at University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
  2. CS 328: Computer Networks and Distributed Systems at UIUC.
  3. 15-744: Computer Networks at Carnegie Mellon University.
  4. 15-849B: NETWORKING: Advanced Network Services at Carnegie Mellon University.
  5. CS 396M: Advanced Networking Protocols at UT Austin.
  6. CS 590F: Design of Multi-service Networks at Purdue University.
  7. CS 590S: Topics in Network Security at UC Santa Cruz.
  8. CSE 207: Cryptography and Network Security at UC San Diego.
• Reading List
  1. Networks Reading Group at Boston University.
• diff-serv
  1. This site has an easy-to-understand discussion on diff-serv which can serve as a starting point.
  2. The official diffserv site maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
• RSVP
  1. This site has an easy but comprehensive introduction to RSVP.
  2. The official RSVP site, also maintained by IETF.
• Routing in Wireless network
  1. Multipath Routing Using Diffusing Computations
  2. Shortest Multipath Routing Using Generalized Diffusing Computations
  3. Loop-free Routing Using Diffusing Computations
  4. Directed diffusion: A scalable and robust communication paradigm for sensor networks
  5. A Survey of Active Network Research
  6. "Declarative ad-hoc sensor networks" by MIT Lincoln lab (coming soon)
  7. Reading List 1 2 for CS 685-002: Topics in Security in Mobile Computing Systems at U of Kentucky
• Power control in Wireless network
  1. D. Famolari, D. GOodman, N. Mandayam, V. Shah,
      "A New Framework for Power Control in Wireless Data networks: Games, Utility, and Pricing"
      Wireless multimedia technologies, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999 link2
  
• Monitoring Very High Speed Links
  This may be a topic for future research.
• Article about publishing papers
• Apr,   4: " Open Problem",
                     (by Matt Hammond)

Recommended Books:

Leon-Garcia and Widjaja, "Communication Networks", by McGraw Hill, 2000
William Stallings, "Cryptography and Network Security", by Prentice Hall, 1998

Course Requirements and Grading

The breakdown of your total score:

• Midterm exam I (2/28/02 in class): 10%
• Midterm exam II (4/18/02 in class): 10%
• Paper reviews and other assignments: 15%
• Term project (including presentation): 60%
• Class participation: 5%

Instructions:

• Both midterm exams will be closed book. They cover the papers discussed in the class.
• Paper reviews are due before the class, NOT after it. Write about 1/2 page for each paper to be reviewed. The review should be in plain ASCII text format (i.e., no WORD, LaTeX, ...). Ways to submit the reviews electronicly will be annouced in class.
• Participation in the class discussion is required and factored into the final grade.
• Instructions for the term project is given separately (below).

Instructions on the Term Project

The goal of the project is to investigate and solve research problems. Up to three (preferable two) students may team up to carry out the term project. Your project can be design/implementation, stochastic modeling/analysis, measurement, and/or simulation. Ideas on possible research projects will be discussed in class. However, I would prefer that you come up with your own project ideas.

Once you choose a topic to work on, you need to submit a one page project proposal that contains the following elements:

• Problem Statement: what is the problem that you are solving?
• Motivations (if not self-evident): why people should care about this work?
• Challenges: why is it not trivial?
• Research plan: how will you attack this problem? specify a rough timetable (when to finish what).

Deliverables of the project:

• A term paper
• Relevant data/analysis/code.

Quality indicator: your project is of 'A' quality if it is publishable in a research conference after minor polishing.

Project presentation: format to be determined.

Help: I will provide feedbacks on your project proposals. Please feel free to drop by during my office hours (or otherwise by appoints) to discuss and develop your project ideas. Discussion with classmates and fellow graduate students can also be helpful (but note that no one is allowed to do your work).