Welcome to Advanced TCP/IP!

Officially, Advanced Computer Networks B!

This course will cover a variety of advanced topics pertaining to TCP/IP that don't get thorough coverage in 443.

Text: Peterson & Davie, Computer Networks: A Systems Approach.

Grades: There will be one in-class exam and a final. The in-class exam is October 17, or week 8. The final exam will be Wednesday, December 12, at the usual time. The final will be worth about 25% more than the midterm. There will also be various homework and programming assignments. The total contribution of these towards your grade is not yet determined, but will probably be in the 20-25% range. General groundrules are here.

In this course we will make substantial use of the ns network simulator.

Comp 443 is a prerequisite! Students in Advanced Networks B are expected to be familiar with:

IP forwarding and addressing
IP subnets and supernets (CIDR)
distance-vector and link-state routing-table update algorithms
TCP connection basics
TCP congestion window; slow-start and congestion-avoidance
TCP fast recovery

Some IP (internetwork layer) issues:

Addresses as Endpoint Identifier versus Locator
Provider v Geographical routing, other routing models
IPv6 routing models
BGP and peering
traceroute mirrors and route asymmetry
IP multicast

Some TCP issues:

Basic TCP congestion management (Reno, Tahoe); detailed analysis
Advanced congestion management (TCP Vegas, RED, etc)
The ns network simulator tool
Reservation models for IP

Other issues:

Queuing theory
Fair queuing
Mathematical models of large networks
Network security; IPSEC
Realtime networking; RTP

The notes file, an attempt at listing what we covered each week. I will also be maintaining a notes file for each week's lecture.

The notes on BGP are here. The cisco bgp case studies are here. The cisco BGP Technical Tips is here.

Homework 2

Moved below

Midterm study guide; the midterm is Oct 17, 2001.
Solutions are here, finally.

Final Exam guide finally available!

Final exam study guide; the final is Wed Dec 12.

Some papers and rfcs

RFC 2581 (txt): A summary of TCP congestion algorithms
RFC 2582 (txt): NewReno TCP
TCP and Successive Fast Retransmits (ps), S Floyd
TCP with SACK, an analysis of adding Selective ACKs to TCP, versus Tahoe, Reno, & NewReno. Graphs were shown in class October 3.
Fail End-to-End Window-based Congestion Control, Mo and Walrand.
RFC 1773: overview of BGP and some comments about its use
RFC 1772: outline of how BGP is to be applied
RFC 1771: BGP protocol spec, not really useful
TFRC papers:
IETF draft proposal for TFRC: TCP-Friendly Rate Control
Floyd et al paper on TFRC postscript format
Floyd et al paper on Additive-Increase/Multiplicative-Decrease postscript format

Programming assignments

Program 1 is due Sept 19
Program 2 is due Friday, November 9
You are to use ns (installed on the Unix machine abel) to run the latestart.tcl file, which you can get either here or in abel:/home/pld/net2, and figure out what part of the scenario's configuration causes the queuesize of 18 to behave so spectacularly badly. You are also to try to see if queuesize = 18 is bad if TCP Reno is used.
Program 3 is due Wednesday, Dec 12 (the date of the final). Click here for details. You are to combine ns output with further processing (using the "awk" script language, or else something similar such as "perl"), to find out about average queue usage in Reno and Vegas.