COMP 831 (241) Internet Architecture and Performance Spring 2008 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM Monday and Wednesday Sitterson 155 Instructor: Don Smith Office hours: 12:30 - 1:30 PM Monday and Wednesday. SN338, smithfd@cs.unc.edu

Introduction

This is an advanced graduate course on the design of Internet protocols and systems. The course is designed to provide students with sufficient background and experience to prepare them for research in networking. Students should have completed an introductory course in networking (e.g., COMP 631 or COMP 431) or have equivalent experience. Empirical methods in networking research, including network measurements, data analysis and laboratory experiments, will be emphasized throughout.

Upon completion, you should

be familiar with the major design trade-offs and decisions used for Internet protocols and systems,

be able to critically assess empirical methods and results reported in the networking research literature, and

be able to perform networking research projects including:

monitoring a network,

deriving workload and performance metrics, and

conducting evaluation experiments using a laboratory network.

The course is taught using lectures, readings from the research literature, and hands-on experiences with experiments, measurements, and data analysis. Course topics (with the approximate number of class meetings in parentheses) are:

Introduction and review of useful statistical tools (4)

Measuring and modeling network applications and workloads (4)

Measuring and modeling packet traffic (5)

End-to-end congestion control mechanisms (5)

Router-based congestion control mechanisms (4)

Service models and resource allocation (3)

High-speed issues (3)

Link to Spring 2006 course web page (internal CS access only)