Lecture Materials

Slides, readings, and related lecture material will appear here gradually throughout the semester.

Introduction and Overview (1 week)

Course overview. Administrative details. Overview of the Internet and its classic TCP/IP protocol stack. The evolving Internet.

Slides:
  Jan 14: Introduction and Course Overview (PPT, PDF) Networking Basics (PPT, PDF)
  Jan 16: HTTP Review (PPT, PDF) TCP Review (PPT, PDF) HTTP and TCP (PPT, PDF)
  Example: TCP trace TCP trace analysis

Computer Systems Performance Evaluation (2 weeks)

Introduction to the basic methodologies of performance evaluation, with examples. Experimental methods. Simulation methods. Analytical methods. Data visualization and graphical presentation of results.

Slides:
  Jan 21: Performance Evaluation (PPT, PDF) Markov Chains (PPT, PDF) barber.pdf teen.c
  Jan 23: Simulation (PPT, PDF) baby.c barber.c teensim.c
  Jan 28: Validation (PPT, PDF) Statistics (PPT, PDF) Data Analysis and Presentation (PPT, PDF)
  Jan 30: No class! Carey away. Assignment 1 due. Self-study: Queueing Theory (PPT, PDF) More Queueing Theory (PPT, PDF)
  Example: D2L Measurement Study (PDF)
  Example: Router Buffer Management (PPT, PDF) partitioned.c shared.c
  Example: Saturation Effects in Speed Scaling Systems (PDF)
  Example: Cheating at Craps: A Quantitative Analysis (PDF)

TCP Performance (1 week)

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). TCP variants. TCP performance modeling. TCP sequence number plots. Multi-path TCP. QUIC. BBR.

Slides:
  Feb 4: TCP Performance Analysis TCP Reno (Padhye 1998) PDF TCP NewReno (Parvez 2010) PDF Compound TCP (Pokhrel 2018) PDF
  Feb 6: TCP Sequence Number Plots (PPT, PDF) WebPDA.pdf PDAtrace.dat conn1064a.pdf conn1064b.pdf conn1209.pdf

Network Traffic Measurement and Modeling (1.5 weeks)

Internet measurement. Network traffic measurement techniques. Network traffic self-similarity. LAN and WAN measurements. WLAN measurements.

Slides:
  Feb 11: Network Traffic Measurement (PPT, PDF) LAN Traffic (PPT, PDF) WAN Traffic (PPT, PDF)
  Feb 13: Mobile Video Streaming Measurements (Guest Lecture: Sina Keshvadi)
  Feb 25: Network Traffic Self-Similarity (PPT, PDF)
  Example: Internet Traffic Measurement (IEEE Internet Computing 2001)
  Example: Strategies for Sound Internet Measurement (ACM IMC 2004)
  Example: Power-Laws in Internet Measurements (IEEE Network 2013)
  Example: Instagram Traffic Measurements (IEEE MASCOTS 2019)

Reading Week Break (Feb 17-21) No Lectures

Wireless Networks (1.5 weeks)

IEEE 802.11b Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Wireless TCP performance issues. Wireless ad hoc networks. Wireless sensor networks.

Slides:
  Feb 27: Wireless Networking (PPT, PDF) WiFi (PPT, PDF) Wireless TCP Issues (PPT, PDF)
  Mar 3: Wireless Network Performance Issues
  Mar 5: Campus WLAN Measurement Studies
  Example: WiFi Efficiency (Excel file)
  Example: Wireless Networking Assumptions (Kotz et al. paper)
  Example: Wireless Web Browsing WebPDA.pdf
  Example: WiFi TCP Fairness (Pilosof et al. paper, IEEE INFOCOM 2003)
  Example: Campus WLAN Traffic (Henderson et al. paper)
  Example: U of C WLAN Traffic (PPT, PDF)

Student Presentations (2.5 weeks)

Presentation and discussion of selected papers from the current networking research literature.

  Mar 10: Global Networking
      Mehdi: Zooming in on Wide-area Latencies to a Global Cloud Provider (ACM SIGCOMM 2019)
      Navid: Taiji: Managing Global User Traffic for Large-Scale Internet Services at the Edge (ACM SOSP 2019)
  Mar 12: Uber Measurements
      Rachel: Peeking Beneath the Hood of Uber (ACM IMC 2015)
      Carey: On Ride Sharing Competition and Accessibility: Evidence from Uber, Lyft, and Taxi (WWW 2018) slides
  Mar 17: Protocol Performance
      Asif: A Measurement Study on Multi-path TCP with Multiple Cellular Carriers on High-speed Rails (ACM SIGCOMM 2018)
      Abdelghani: The QUIC Transport Protocol: Design and Internet-Scale Deployment (ACM SIGCOMM 2017)
  Mar 19: Online Social Networks
      Vahid: Social Clicks: What and Who Gets Read on Twitter? (ACM SIGMETRICS 2016)
      Carey: Campus-Level Instagram Traffic: A Case Study (IEEE MASCOTS 2019) (slides: PPT, PDF)
  Mar 24: Novel Measurements
      Kyle: Beyond Counting: New Perspectives on the Active IPv4 Address Space (ACM IMC 2016)
      Carey: Understanding the Networking Performance of Wear OS (ACM SIGMETRICS 2019) slides: PPT, PDF

Hot Topics in Networking (2.5 weeks)

Selected topics, based on student interest. Cloud computing. Data center networks. Software-Defined Networking (SDN). Multimedia streaming. HTTP/2.0. Mobile computing. Online social networks. Network security. Energy-efficient networking. Wireless sensor networks. Internet of Things.

  Mar 26: Software-Defined Networking (SDN)
      SDN Overview (PPT, PDF)   B4: Google's SDN WAN (ACM SIGCOMM 2013)   B4 and After (ACM SIGCOMM 2018) slides
  Mar 31: Cloud Computing
      Overview   Amazon EC2 Study (ACM TOMPECS) (slides: PPT, PDF)  
  Apr 2: Data Centers
      Overview   Data Center Networks (PPT, PDF)   DC-TCP (ACM SIGCOMM 2010)   Google's Data Center Network (ACM SIGCOMM 2015)
  Apr 7: Netflix
      Overview (PDF)   U of C Study (SPECTS 2017) (PPT, PDF)   Workload (IISWC 2016) (paper PDF)   Prefetching (ACM TOMPECS 2018) (paper PDF)
  Apr 9: Online Social Networks (OSNs)
      Facebook's DCN Traffic (ACM SIGCOMM 2015)   User Behaviour (ACM IMC 2009)   User Characterization (SNAM 2016)
  Apr 14: Scheduling and Performance
      Load Balancing Guardrails (ACM SIGMETRICS 2019) (paper PDF, slides PPT, PDF) Multi-Server SRPT (IFIP Performance 2018)