Calendar

Syllabus Calendar Reading Blog & Presentations Reproduction Project

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

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

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

Week 3

Thu 10/8 SDN & programmable networks

Background The Road to SDN: An Intellectual History of Programmable Networks, N. Feamster, J. Rexford, E. Zegura, SIGCOMM CCR 2014

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

Tue 10/13 Network verification & formal methods

Background Header Space Analysis: Static Checking for Networks, P. Kazemian, G. Varghese, N. McKeown, NSDI 2012

Research paper NDD: A Decision Diagram for Network Verification, Z. Li, P. Zhang, Y. Zhang, H. Yang — NSDI 2025 (Outstanding Paper Award)

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

Alt: Agarwal, Arun, Seshan, Contracts: A Unified Lens on Congestion Control, NINeS 2026.

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 In-class proposal pitches (5 min per team)

Background QUIC at Google: Deployed at Scale, 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

Week 5

Thu 10/22 Datacenter transport: rethinking the model

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

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

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 DCTCP: Data Center TCP, M. Alizadeh et al., SIGCOMM 2010

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

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 InfiniteHBD: Building Datacenter-Scale High-Bandwidth Domain for LLM with Optical Circuit Switching Transceivers, C. Shou, G. Liu, H. Nie et al. — SIGCOMM 2025

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

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

Alt: Z. Liu, S. Oh, B. Tao et al., EcoCell: Energy Conservation through Traffic Shaping in Cellular Radio Access Networks, NINeS 2026.

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

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 Analyzing Starlink from the Ground, Q. Michel et al., SIGCOMM 2022

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

Alt: B. Kataria, H. Bin Tanveer, R. Nithyanand, R. Singh, What Obstructed Skies Teach Us about Satellite Internet, NINeS 2026.

A systems paper: rather than measuring LEO performance, LeoCC proposes a new CC algorithm aware of satellite-induced path changes.

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

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

Alt: M. Tariq, Y. Chen, H. Hassanieh, R. Mittal, Performance Isolation for 5G RAN Slices Across Multiple Interfering Cells, NINeS 2026.

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

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

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 — 15 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

Companion reading: M. Weaver, D. Veitch, P. Barford, F. E. Bustamante, E. Carisimo, Monitoring Latency on Submarine Cables, NINeS 2026.

Presenter: Fabián.

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)