Advanced Computer Networks

Timings: Tu: 9:00-10:00, Th: 9:00-11:00

Tentative Course Schedule

Grading Policy

The following is the grading policy that will be followed in this course:

ASSIGNMENTS

The assignment will involve simulation using Mininet. You are advised to start looking at tutorials of how to use it. We will have a special tutorial by one of our alumni on a saturday - most likely on Jan. 21st.

The assignment will generate data that you should analyse and write it up as a term paper for the course as a typical science paper.

Mininet References: Here are some links that will help you out with the Mininet emulator.

iperf Resources:

Assignment Specification

Set up a simple topology with a single switch and 4 hosts connected to it. Start iperf traffic with both TCP and UDP from one host H1 to the server host H4. In another system, H2, start traffic to HTTP server on H4. From H3, send UDP and TCP traffic to H4. Make sure that the bandwidth of the links is 1Gbps for all the links. Use 512Mbps bandwidth for all the UDP flows. Since the traffic from UDP exceeds the bandwidth of the link to H4, study the throughput of the TCP flows. Draw graphs of the bandwidth achieved by UDP and TCP flows. Stop the UDP traffic and observe how the TCP traffic throughput changes when UDP traffic is withdrawn.

In the second part of the assignment, set up different queues for UDP flows and TCP flows with each of them getting 512Mbps bandwidth each. Check the throughput for the UDP and TCP flows. Withdraw UDP flows as earlier and see the change in TCP throughput. Plot the graphs for the various flows.

Experimental Design: Make sure you run the above two experiments at least 10 times and take the average of the results computed. When you take only one measurement, it does not reflect the true state of the system. The graphs you plot must be the average of the 10 runs of the experiment.

Term Paper

Your term paper must consist of introduction to the problem being solved. It should then have a section on "Experimental Design" which gives in detail, the set up you have used to do the problem. It should include the commands/scripts etc. as part of this section. The third section should consist of the graphs you have obtained from the results of your work and an analysis of why the throughput is what it is - this should build up on your thorough understanding of TCP and UDP and the queueing that we have discussed. Look at the throughput on the client and server sides, if possible. Most importantly, look at the throughput of simple HTTP traffic and not a big file download using HTTP. See the difference in throughput of iperf TCP connections and HTTP. Explain the difference in throughput observed, if any. The final section should consist of your conclusions from your experiment. What are the lessons we can derive from the results observed?

Submission Guidelines: You need to submit ONLY the .pdf file of your term paper. The name of the term paper MUST be as follows: MTxx_MTyy.pdf or MTxx_MByy.pdf or MCxx_MCyy.pdf etc. where xx and yy are the reg. nos of the students who are the partners. If you feel that you would like to submit all of your files, including the graph image files, scripts etc., you need to submit a .tar file with the name MTxx_MTyy.tar and when I untar it, it should create a directory of the name MTxx_MTyy. All files should be under this directory. Otherwise, it is impossible for me to grade your assignments. DO FOLLOW THE GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION WITHOUT FAIL.

PART I: IPv6 - Related Links

PART II: Mobile IPv4 and Mobile IPv6 - Related Links

PART II: QOS, Traffic Engineering and Label Switching

PART III: Introduction to Software Defined Networking

The papers consulted for the brief introduction to SDN that we did in the class are given below along with my lecture notes on SDN basics and a simple White paper I found similar to my lecture notes. I have also included slides of Nick Mckeown and Scott Shenker that I consulted widely to do my lecture notes. I have also put up the link to the YouTube video of Scott Shenker's amazing talk at ONS-2011 as well. There are links to blogs on SDN by Martin Casado and others who are the leaders working in SDN as further optional reading for those interested in exploring further. I have also linked up to Jennifer Rexford's course on SDN for even further reading of papers that are the shakers and movers of the networking world.

ENJOY!

I found a book Software Defined Networks by Nadeau and Gray from O'Reilly publishers that seems to be really good for SDN.