ECS 258: Networking Architecture & Resource Management

Summary of Course Content

1. Network architecture: the big picture
   1. Circuit switching vs. packet switching
   2. End-to-end arguments
   3. Separation of control & data planes; signaling (hard state vs. soft state)
2. Telephony - Circuit-switched architecture
   1. Space and time-division circuit switches
   2. Strict-sense vs. rearrangably non-blocking
3. Internet: Packet-switched architecture
   1. IP and routing hierarchy (intra-domain vs. inter-domain routing)
   2. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and policy-based routing
   3. Multicast routing
4. Evolving Internet Archtecture and Quality of Service (QoS)
   1. Application vs. Network based solutions
   2. Differentiated Service and Integrated Service QoS architecture
   3. Control-plane mechanisms, e.g., admission control, QoS routing
   4. Data-plane mechanisms
      1. Packet schedulers, e.g., weighted fair queuing (WFQ)
      2. Active queue management, e.g., random early detection (RED)
5. Protocol mechanisms (commonly found techniques in networking protocols)
   1. Signaling
   2. Randomization
   3. Indirection
   4. Multiplexing
   5. Virtualization
   6. Scalability
6. Network Resource Management
   1. Capacity planning
   2. Traffic engineering
   3. Network flows, optimal link-weight assignment problem
7. Advanced Topics
   1. Internate measurements, modeling, and inferences
   2. Application and services (peer-to-peer, overlay)
   3. Network security
   4. Multimedia networking

Project/TermPaper: Students work individually or in small groups on course projects that contribute to 40% of the course. The project should demonstrate quality, significance, and in-depth knowledge of the scope of the topics covered in the course. One unit of the independent study should be used for advanced reading that will be assigned in class. The project may involve: (1) conducting thorough survey of an advanced topic, or (2) Proposing/designing of a new protocol or extension of an existing one followed by its evaluation (via analysis, simulation or experiment). Students therefore gain hands-on experience in network protocol design, development and analysis.

Illustrative Reading
References: Selected conference/journal papers D. Bertsekas and R. Gallager, Data Networks, Prentice Hall, 1992. J.E. Kurose and K.W. Ross, Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet, Addison-Wesley, 2000.

Potential Course Overlap
There is no significant overlap with other courses. This course focuses more on architecture aspect and resource management in the evolving Internet and hence complements ECS252, which covers the fundamental design principles of different network protocol layers.