Seminar Rechnernetze/Computer networks

Topic winter term 2019/2020: Current Advances in 5G Network Softwarization

Networks have traditionally been structured with a lot of their functionality set in hardware: most of a router's or a switch's functionality is embedded in custom chipsets. This made them fast but inflexibile. Recently, and particularly with the advent of 5G, the idea of network softwarization has taken hold: Replace hardware-based implementations by software running on commodity hardware. This entails a large number of consequences for the architecture and operation of large-scale networks. This seminar will look into multiple aspects. 

Specific topics for winter term 2019/2020

Here is a preliminiary list of possible topics, each with some research papers to start from. To be extended. 

PAPERS IN ITALICS ARE TAKEN! 

1. A clean slate 4D approach to network control and management. Albert Greenberg, Gisli Hjalmtysson, David A. Maltz, Andy Myers, Jennifer Rexford, Geoffrey Xie, Hong Yan, Jibin Zhan, and Hui Zhang. CCR October 2005.

2. A first-principles approach to understanding the Internet's router-level topology, Lun Li, David Alderson, Walter Willinger, John Doyle. SIGCOMM 2004.

3. A delay-tolerant network architecture for challenged internets. Kevin Fall, Proc. SIGCOMM 2003.

4. A Scalable Content-addressable Network. Sylvia Ratnasamy, Paul Francis, Mark Handley, Richard Karp, Scott Shenker, Proc. ACM SIGCOMM 2001.

5. Addressing Function Approximation Error in Actor-Critic Methods (TD3): https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.09477

6. Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning (A3C): https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.01783

7. Brent Chun, David Culler, Timothy Roscoe, Andy Bavier, Larry Peterson, Mike Wawrzoniak and Mic Bowman, PlanetLab: an overlay testbed for broad-coverage services. Proc. SIGCOMM CCR, Volume 33 Issue 3 (July 2003). http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=956995

8. P. V. Mockapetris, K. J. Dunlap. Development of the Domain Name System. (Proc. SIGCOMM `88, Stanford, CA, August 1988, Vol. 18, No. 4) http://ccr.sigcomm.org/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-mockapet.html

9. Zerwas, J., Kalmbach, P., Henkel, L., Rétvári, G., Kellerer, W., Blenk, A., & Schmid, S. (2019, August). NetBOA: Self-Driving Network Benchmarking. In Proceedings of the 2019 Workshop on Network Meets AI & ML(pp. 8-14). ACM.  https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3342207

10. He, Mu, et al. “Toward Consistent State Management of Adaptive Programmable Networks Based on P4.” Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2019 Workshop on Networking for Emerging Applications and Technologies.  ACM, 2019.  https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3342202

11. Overload Control for Scaling WeChat Microservices https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3267823

12. Understanding Lifecycle Management Complexity of Datacenter Topologies https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi19/presentation/zhang

13. Eiffel: Efficient and Flexible Software Packet Scheduling https://www.usenix.org/system/files/nsdi19-saeed.pdf

14. Approximating Fair Queueing on Reconfigurable Switches

    https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/nsdi18/nsdi18-sharma.pdf

15. Learning scheduling algorithms for data processing clusters https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3342080

16. XORs in the air: practical wireless network coding https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1159942

17. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle With Underlaid Device-to-Device Communications: Performance and Tradeoffs https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7412759

18. Measurement and Analysis of Online Social Networks : http://conferences.sigcomm.org/imc/2007/papers/imc170.pdf

19. Tenant-side management of Service Function Chaining: architecture, implementation and experiment on a Future Internet testbed: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8806702

20. Adaptive Service Deployment using In-Network Mediation : https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8584954

     

Goals

The goals of a seminar (Master) or proseminar (Bachelor) are to introduce and practice the reading, writing, and presentation of technical and scientific content. This includes, yet is not limited to: 

• Independent understanding and production of content based on original literature 
• Finding suitable sources based on first hints 
• Selecting important content and disregarding less relevant material 
• Preparing a writeup (an excellent exercise for later production of Master thesis and similar documents) 
• Presenting content to an audience 

Seminars and proseminars are structurally very similar; seminars address students in a Master program and hence have slightly higher expectation levels regarding content as well as independence of work. 

Organisation 

We typically run seminars as "mini conferences", in a block format. Participants will assumes the roles of "authors" in such a conference as well as those of "reviewers". This will introduce a crucial aspects of the scientific community and its processes; in addition, it will also give participants a broader, more critical understanding of text production and reception. 

There are a couple of typical steps: 

• Assignment of topics 
• VERY short review of assigned literature, identifying a set of sources to work from 
• Structure of the writeup 
• Writeup in a draft format 
• Mutual review of drafts amongst participants 
• Final version of writeup 
• Draft version of presentation (slides or similar) 
• Final version of presentation 
• Actual presentation 

Grading 

The grade of a seminar comprises aspects of text production, independence, originality, presentation quality, and discussions during the actual "conference". 

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is an annoying yet repeating issue in such events. We will extensively discuss what constitutes plagiarism and help to avoid it. But we will also not tolerate any form of plagiarism and strictly follow procedures as specified in the exam regulations.