Calendar

Syllabus Calendar Reading Blog & Presentations Reproduction Project

[B] = background paper (no blog post required) · [R] = research paper (blog post required)

Fabián presents the background paper in every session; the listed student presents the research paper.

Week 1
Thu 9/24 Course introduction Form teams

Background How to Read a Paper, S. Keshav, SIGCOMM CCR 2007

Writing Reviews for Systems Conferences, T. Roscoe, SOSP 2007

How to Give a Great Research Talk, S. Peyton Jones et al., SIGPLAN 1993

No blog post due. Presenter: Fabián.

Tue 9/29 Network design & architecture Team formation confirmed

Background The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols, D. Clark, SIGCOMM 1988

Research paper There is More to Internet Invariants Than Meets the Eye, C. Misa, W. Willinger, R. Durairajan, R. Rejaie — NINeS 2026

Presenter: Fabián.

Opens the course with a foundational provocation: what properties of the Internet can we actually rely on? Watch the pre-recorded NINeS talk before class.
Week 2
Thu 10/1 Internet routing & reachability

Background Stable Internet Routing Without Global Coordination, L. Gao and J. Rexford, SIGMETRICS 2000

Research paper Understanding Partial Reachability in the Internet Core, G. Baltra, T. Saluja, Y. Pradkin, J. Heidemann — NINeS 2026

Presenter: Fabián.

From policy design (Gao-Rexford) to an underexplored question: not all reachability failures are total. What do partial failures reveal about routing system design?
Tue 10/6 WAN architecture & traffic engineering Paper selection + project proposal

Background B4: Experience with a Globally-Deployed Software Defined WAN, S. Jain et al., SIGCOMM 2013

Research paper Raha: A General Tool to Analyze WAN Degradation, B. Arzani, S. Taheri, P. Namyar, R. Beckett, S. K. Kakarla, E. Jalilipour — SIGCOMM 2025

Presenter: Fabián.

From WAN optimization (B4) to an underexplored question: what happens when the network degrades rather than simply fails? How can we systematically reason about the consequences of partial performance loss?
Week 3
Thu 10/8 Data-center fabrics / multipath control

Background A Scalable, Commodity Data Center Network Architecture, M. Al-Fares, A. Loukissas, A. Vahdat, SIGCOMM 2008

Research paper Unlocking ECMP Programmability for Precise Traffic Control, Y. Liu, Y. Xiao, X. Zhang et al. — NSDI 2025

Presenter: Gavin Wang.

From scalable path diversity (Al-Fares) to precise path control: ECMP gives commodity networks many paths but little control over which one a flow takes. Can we make ECMP itself programmable?
Tue 10/13 Project Proposal Presentations
Week 4
Thu 10/15 Congestion control: signals & theory

Background Beyond Jain’s Fairness Index, R. Ware, M. Mukerjee, S. Seshan, J. Sherry, HotNets 2019

Research paper No Signal to Rule Them All: A Systematic Analysis of In-Network Congestion Signals, S. McClure, N. Dukkipati, S. Ratnasamy, S. Shenker — NINeS 2026

Presenter: Kaito Sekiya.

Argues no single in-network congestion signal can satisfy all desiderata simultaneously. Dukkipati also delivers a NINeS keynote on CC — watch both paper and talk.
Tue 10/20 Transport & QUIC

Background The QUIC Transport Protocol: Design and Internet-Scale Deployment, A. Langley et al., SIGCOMM 2017

Research paper Waiting for QUIC: Passive Measurements to Understand QUIC Deployments, J. Mücke, M. Nawrocki, R. Hiesgen et al. — CoNEXT 2025

Presenter: Phillip Kobylinski.

From designing and deploying QUIC to measuring what followed: QUIC promised a more evolvable transport protocol and was rapidly deployed at Google scale. Years later, what does Internet-wide deployment actually look like, and what does it reveal about how new transport protocols diffuse in practice?
Week 5
Thu 10/22 Datacenter transport: rethinking the model

Background Data Center TCP (DCTCP), M. Alizadeh et al., SIGCOMM 2010

Research paper Simulate Before Sending: Rethinking Transport in Datacenter Networks, D. Straussman, I. Keslassy, A. Shpiner, L. Liss — NINeS 2026

Presenter: Winnie Vallonia Nna.

Proposes that endpoints simulate network behavior before committing to a send rate — a genuine departure from reactive transport design.
Tue 10/27 RDMA & high-performance datacenter networking

Background Congestion Control for Large-Scale RDMA Deployments, Y. Zhu et al., SIGCOMM 2015

Research paper Revisiting RDMA Reliability for Lossy Fabrics, W. Li, X. Liu, Y. Zhang et al. — SIGCOMM 2025 (Best Student Paper, Honorable Mention)

Presenter: Arthur Mendes Pereira.

From making RDMA work over lossless Ethernet (DCQCN) to questioning lossless RDMA: can high-performance datacenter transport remain reliable and efficient when packet loss is treated as a normal condition rather than something the fabric must prevent?
Week 6
Thu 10/29 ML training networks Midpoint report

Background Efficient Large-Scale Language Model Training on GPU Clusters Using Megatron-LM, D. Narayanan et al., SC 2021

Research paper DistTrain: Addressing Model and Data Heterogeneity with Disaggregated Training for Multimodal LLMs, Z. Zhang et al. — SIGCOMM 2025

Presenter: Sebastian Pacheco.

From parallelizing large models to disaggregating heterogeneous ones: large-scale training distributes computation across GPUs, but multimodal models combine components and data with very different resource demands. Should they all share the same parallelization and resource-allocation strategy?
Tue 11/3 Sustainable & energy-efficient networking

Background The Datacenter as a Computer (power and energy chapters), L. A. Barroso, U. Hölzle, P. Ranganathan, 3rd ed., 2019

Research paper GREEN: Carbon-Efficient Resource Scheduling for Machine Learning Clusters, K. Xu, D. Sun, H. Tian, J. Zhang, K. Chen — NSDI 2025

Presenter: Sicheng Liu.

From energy-efficient datacenters to carbon-aware computation: datacenter design has long treated power and energy as critical resources to optimize. But when the carbon intensity of electricity varies across time and location, can workloads themselves be scheduled to reduce emissions without sacrificing performance?
Week 7
Thu 11/5 Naming & DNS infrastructure

Background Akamai DNS: Providing Authoritative Answers to the World’s Queries, K. Schomp et al., SIGCOMM 2020

Research paper OpenFLAME: A Federated Spatial Naming Infrastructure, S. Bharadwaj, Z. Ma, I. Liang, M. Farb, A. Rowe, S. Seshan — NINeS 2026

Presenter: Hyunseok Jang.

Akamai DNS shows naming at scale for the current Internet; OpenFLAME asks what naming should look like for future networked systems — location-aware, federated, built for IoT and physical spaces.
Tue 11/10 LEO satellites & new access infrastructure

Background A First Look at Starlink Performance, F. Michel, M. Trevisan, D. Giordano, O. Bonaventure, IMC 2022

Research paper LeoCC: Making Internet Congestion Control Robust to LEO Satellite Dynamics, Z. Lai, Z. Li, Q. Wu et al. — SIGCOMM 2025

Presenter: Robert Hayek.

From characterizing LEO Internet access to redesigning congestion control for its dynamics: Starlink measurements reveal an access network whose paths and performance change as satellites move. What happens when transport protocols built for terrestrial networks mistake those infrastructure dynamics for congestion?
Week 8
Thu 11/12 Video QoE & real-time congestion control

Background Video Stream Quality Impacts Viewer Behavior, S. Krishnan and R. Sitaraman, IMC 2012

Research paper Tight Loops, Smooth Streams: Responsive Congestion Control for Real-Time Video, P. Karimi, S. Fouladi, V. Sivaraman, M. Alizadeh — NINeS 2026

Presenter: Megxi Xia.

Argues TCP-style CC is architecturally too slow for real-time video. Watch the pre-recorded NINeS talk before class.
Tue 11/17 Mobile & wireless systems design

Background BBR: Congestion-Based Congestion Control, N. Cardwell, Y. Cheng, C. S. Gunn, S. H. Yeganeh, V. Jacobson, ACM Queue 2016

Research paper BISCAY: Practical Radio KPI Driven Congestion Control for Mobile Networks, J. Larrea, T. Shreedhar, A. Niemi, A. Sefiane, M. K. Marina — NINeS 2026

Presenter: Albert Luo.

BBR uses network-layer signals to estimate state; BISCAY adds radio-layer KPIs as an additional signal source — extending model-based CC into the mobile context.
Week 9
Thu 11/19 Anonymity & privacy infrastructure

Background Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router, R. Dingledine, N. Mathewson, P. Syverson, USENIX Security 2004

Research paper Don’t get caught, keep your Onions in a Vault, H. Ikram, R. Habib, M. Ali, Z. A. Uzmi — NINeS 2026

Presenter: Charles Kozel.

From the original Tor design to a new approach to anonymity infrastructure. Discussion should address both the systems design choices and the ethical implications.
Tue 11/24 BGP security & routing integrity Final report (including critique section)

Background How Secure Are Secure Interdomain Routing Protocols?, S. Goldberg, M. Schapira, P. Hummon, J. Rexford, SIGCOMM 2010

Research paper Passive Data-Plane Telemetry to Mitigate Long-Distance BGP Hijacks, S. Sengupta, H. Kim, D. Jubas, M. Apostolaki, J. Rexford — NINeS 2026

Presenter: Hyunseok Jang.

The background paper asks how secure BGP security proposals are; this paper proposes bypassing the BGP control plane entirely for hijack detection using in-band telemetry. Note the Rexford co-authorship across both papers — 16 years of progress on the same problem.
Week 10
Tue 12/1 CDN architecture & Internet infrastructure

Background Engineering Egress with Edge Fabric, B. Schlinker, H. Kim, T. Cunha et al., SIGCOMM 2017

Research paper Who Holds the Steering Wheel? Opacity and Consolidation in CDN Replica Selection, R. Kumar, F. E. Bustamante, M. Flores — NINeS 2026

Presenter: Jintao Wang.

Edge Fabric shows how content leaves a major network; this paper asks who controls which CDN replica serves you — and argues that consolidation is making that answer increasingly opaque.
Thu 12/3 Student project presentations Blog posts due
All teams present (15 min + Q&A).
Week Finals
Reproduction project presentations (date TBD)