In addition to basic knowledge found in textbooks and taught in courses, and in addition to classical results published in seminal papers, students are also expected to be familiar with important recent advances in topics that are currently in vogue within the community, as well as recent and on-going projects involving members of the WING group. This dimension of the exam  tests if a student is able to critically review and constructively build upon recent works within the WING group and in the networking community at large.

To prepare for this, students are encouraged to keep up with fresh ideas appearing in the most recent networking venues (and even non-networking venues for multi-disciplinary work with a networking component). Rather than enumerating a specific list of recent papers, we expect students to spend time developing a feel for current topic and timely research directions.

You are also expected to be abreast of work done by our networking faculty as reported in their technical reports published in recent years. You should talk to the networking faculty if you have any questions about their recent work and interests. This component is important to ensure that you are fully aware of the research interests of faculty, and opportunities for research topics related to existing projects in the department.

Note that what constitutes good preparation is not the ability to reproduce the ideas or answer direct questions about recent works, but rather the ability to identify the key contributions as well as any perceived weaknesses, possible improvements, etc. Checking such abilities will typically involve giving students a recent paper (or part thereof) with the expectation that they will be already familiar with the necessary background and related works to be able to answer questions.