Welcome to Advanced TCP/IP!

Formerly known as Advanced Networks.

Final Exam study guide now available!

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 Wednesday, March 13. The final exam will be Tuesday, May 7, at 12:40; this is actually the time slot for classes meeting at 1:30. 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

• Week 1
• Week 2
• Week 3
• Week 4
• Week 5
• Week 6
• Week 7
• Week 8
• Week 9
• Week 10
• Week 11
• Week 12
• Week 13
• Week 14

The revised notes on BGP are here. The pdf (acroread) version of the cisco bgp case studies is here. The bgp case studies web version is here. The cisco BGP Technical Tips is here.

Final Exam Study Guide is here!

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

• Program 1: AIMD equivalents, due Feb 8 Here is the tcpsim.java file, with which to start. The paper A Comparison of Equation-Based and AIMD Congestion Control may be of interest, although you certainly don't need it to do the assignment.
• Program 2: NS tracefiles, due Feb 29 Here is the tcl file (ns source) basic1.tcl, and the trace file basic1.tr that it creates.
• Program 3: average queue utilization, due May 7. Here is the tcl file qsize.tcl to use to get started.