TELCOM 2321 - CS 2520
Wide Area Networks
Spring term 2008
Tuesday 6:00 pm - 8:50 pm
411 SIS building
Quick link to course schedule and material
Announcements
4/16/08 - Review material for the final has been posted
Instructor
Dr. Walter Cerroni
709 SIS
wcerroni AT sis DOT pitt DOT edu
Tel: 412-624-9197
Office Hours
Wednesday: 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Thursday: 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Additional hours by appointment
TA/GSA
PJ Dillon (grader)
pdillon AT cs DOT pitt DOT edu
Chih-Kuang Lin (lab)
chl21+ AT pitt DOT edu
714 SIS
Office hours: Fri 12.00 pm - 2:00 pm
Course overview and objectives
The widespread use of networking technologies to deliver data and multimedia services to end users all over the world is an important challenge for the global network infrastructure. High-speed Wide Area Network (WAN) technologies must then cope with different service requirements and be capable of providing a satisfying level of Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of available bandwidth and limited latency and jitter.
The main objective of this course is to provide an understanding of the basic principles and fundamental design issues related to multi-service networks, with particular reference to TCP/IP networks.
General topics such as flow and congestion control, traffic shaping and packet scheduling will be the focus of the first part of the course. Then the TCP flow and congestion control and the Internet QoS architectures (IntServ, DiffServ) will be discussed in detail. MPLS and protocols for multimedia services will also be covered.
Prerequisite
TELCOM 2310 or other background on computer networking fundamentals.
Syllabus
Get the syllabus here
Textbook
William Stallings, High Speed Networks and Internets: Performance and Quality of Service, 2nd Edition, Prentice Hall, 2002.
Additional reference material
- Research papers on specific topics will be suggested during the course.
- Zheng Wang, Internet QoS: Architectures and Mechanisms for Quality of Service, Morgan Kaufmann, 2001.
- Larry L. Peterson and Bruce S. Davie, Computer Networks: A Systems Approach, 3rd Edition, Morgan Kaufmann, 2003.
Course Evaluation
Homework/Lab: 20%
Project: 30%
Mid-term exam: 20%
Final exam: 30%
| Letter grade | Point range |
| A+ | 98-100 |
| A | 93-97 |
| A- | 90-92 |
| B+ | 88-89 |
| B | 83-87 |
| B- | 80-82 |
| C | 65-79 |
| F | 0-64 |
Course Policies
All work must be the student's own, unless collaboration is specifically and explicitly permitted.
The course will use both a textbook as well as a set of research papers. We will use the textbook for the fundamentals and seminal research papers for specific topics.
Students are expected to regularly check this webpage for announcements, class schedule updates, lecture notes, homework assignment and solutions and other related course material.
Homework assignments are expected to be turned in at the start of class period on the due date. Typically, homework is due one week after it is assigned, unless otherwise mentioned. Late assignments will be penalized.
Project policies will be posted here soon.
Mid-term exam will be during class hours.
Final project
CS preliminary examination
Information about prelim and topics covered
Tentative course schedule and related material
This course schedule is tentative and may be subject to changes. Check this web page regularly for updates.
| TELCOM 2321 - CS 2520: Wide Area Networks | ||||
| Week | Date | Topics | Lecture notes | Assignments |
| 1 | 1/8/08 | Introduction to the course Network Architectures and Protocols Fundamentals The case of WANs: requirements for High-speed Multi-service Networks |
Lecture 1 | Homework 1 (solution) |
| 2 | 1/15/08 | WANs Design Issues Latency-Bandwidth Trade-off The end-to-end argument Data Link Layer Flow and Error Control Schemes |
Lecture 2 Lecture 3 |
Homework 2 (solution) |
| 3 | 1/22/08 | Performance of data link layer ARQ protocols End-to-End Flow and Congestion Control Schemes Closed loop flow control Reading: Textbook, Chap. 11 |
Last part of Lecture 3 Lecture 4 |
Homework 3 (solution) |
| 4 | 1/29/08 | Case study: ATM ABR service Case study: the M-K scheme Reading: Textbook, Chap. 5, Sections 5.1, 5.2, 5.4 Textbook, Chap. 13, Section 13.5 P. Mishra, H. Kanakia, A hop by hop rate-based congestion control scheme ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Vol. 22, No. 4, October 1992, pp. 112-123 |
Last part of Lecture 4 | Homework 4 (papers review) |
| 5 | 2/5/08 | Open loop flow control Traffic burstiness Traffic shaping Router architectures Reading: Textbook, Chap. 9, Sections 9.1, 9.3, 9.4 and subsection of 9.2 on heavy-tailed distributions S. Keshav, R. Sharma, Issues and Trends in Router Design IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 36, No. 5, May 1998, pp. 144-151 |
Lecture 5 Lecture 6 |
Homework 5 (solution) |
| 6 | 2/12/08 |
Router architectures Packet Scheduling for QoS FCFS Priority queuing |
Last part of Lecture 6 Lecture 7, part 1 |
No assignment |
| 7 | 2/19/08 |
Packet Scheduling for QoS Fair scheduling algorithms Generalized processor sharing Weighted fair queuing Reading: Textbook, Chap. 17, Section 17.2 |
Lecture 7, part 2 | Lab assignment 1 queue.tcl |
| 8 | 2/26/08 | Generalized processor sharing Weighted fair queuing |
Last part of Lecture 7 | Mid-term review material |
| 9 | 3/4/08 | Mid-term exam Active queue management: RED Reading: Textbook, Chap. 17, Section 17.3 S. Floyd, V. Jacobson, Random Early Detection Gateways for Congestion Avoidance IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Vol. 1, No. 4, August 1993, pp. 397-413 B. Braden et al, Recommendations on Queue Management and Congestion Avoidance in the Internet IETF RFC 2309, April 1998 |
Lecture 8 | Mid-term exam (solution) Homework 6 |
| 3/11/08 | Spring Break | |||
| 10 | 3/18/08 | Discussion about RED TCP recap TCP Flow Control TCP Congestion Control |
Lecture 9 | Lab assignment 2 tahoe.tcl |
| 11 | 3/25/08 |
TCP performance models Reading: M. Mathis, J. Semke, J. Mahdavi, T. Ott, The macroscopic behavior of the TCP congestion avoidance algorithm ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Vol. 27, No. 3, July 1997 |
Lecture 10 | No assignment |
| 12 | 4/1/08 | QoS: Integrated Services Architecture Resource reservation protocol QoS: Differentiated Services Architecture Reading: Textbook, Chap. 17, Sections 17.1, 17.4 Textbook, Chap. 18, Section 18.1 |
Lecture 11 Lecture 12 |
No assignment |
| 13 | 4/8/08 | Multi-Protocol Label Switching Generalized MPLS Reading: Textbook, Chap. 18, Section 18.2 |
Lecture 13 part 1 Lecture 13 part 2 |
No assignment |
| 14 | 4/15/08 | Project presentations | Information on final evaluation and project presentation schedule | Final exam review material |
| 15 | 4/22/08 | Final Exam | ||