Time/ Location. Thursdays 3:30 – 5:30pm. SN 325.

Instructor. Sanjoy Baruah [baruah@cs.unc.edu; (919)962-1803; Sitterson 319]

Course Goal. To become familiar with the state of the art regarding scheduling strategies used in computer networks for supporting real-time multimedia applications.

Objectives. At the end of this course, you should be able to

• Explain the details of several different scheduling strategies that have been presented in a selection of recent articles in technical journals and conference proceedings.
• Compare and contrast between these different scheduling strategies, and determine which strategy is most suitable for particular applications.
• Perhaps perform original research on extending some of these strategies.

Grading. Since this is a seminar course, there will be a minimal number of assignments, tests, and other stress-inducing activities. One third of the overall grade will be determined by class attendence and participation. Another third will be determined by performance on a few problem sets. For the final third of the grade, each student may either give an in-class presentation or take the final exam. (A suitable project may be used to substitute for one or more of these requirements. A student wishing to perform a project should consult with the instructor.)

Textbooks etc. We will cover one chapter (Ch 9 – Scheduling) from the following text:

In addition we will discuss a number of articles from recent issues of journals and conference proceedings. Copies of these will be made available in class. These include:

• H. Zhang. Service disciplines for guaranteed performance service in packet-switching networks. Proceedings of the IEEE 83(10), October 1995.

• Abhay K. Parekh and Robert G. Gallager. A generalized processor sharing approach to flow control in integrated services networks: the single-node case. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 1(3), pp. 344-357, June 1993.

• J. C. R. Bennett and H. Zhang. WF²Q: Worst-case fair weighted fair queueing. Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM, San Francisco, March 1996.
• D. Ferrari and D. Verma. A scheme for real-time channel establishment in wide-area networks. IEEE journal on selected areas in communication 8(3), pp 368-379. 1990.

• J. C. R. Bennett and H. Zhang. Hierarchical packet fair queueing algorithms. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 5(5):675-689, Oct 1997.

• Ion Stoica, Hui Zhang, T. S. Eugene Ng. A hierarchical fair service curve algorithm for link-sharing, real-time and priority service. Proceedings of SIGCOMM'97.

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  Problem1 (handed out on 19^th August)
• Problem Set (handed out on September 2^nd)
• Final Project (handed out on November 13^th)

• Lecture 1 (19^th August):
• Transparencies
• Problem1
• Lecture 2 (26^th August):
• Transparencies
• Lecture 3 (2^nd September):
• Transparencies
• Problem Set
• Lecture 4 (9^th September):
• Transparencies
• Lecture 5 (16^th September):
• Class cancelled -- Hurricane Floyd
• Lecture 6 (23^rd September):
• Transparencies
• Lecture 7 (30^th September):
• Transparencies
• Lecture 8 (21^st October):
• Transparencies
• Lecture 9 (28^th October):
• Transparencies