Introduction

This set of papers introduces a variety of architectural choices for where to place functionalities and what kind of interfaces we would provide, with implications on security, performance, etc.

J. Saltzer, D. Reed, and D. Clark. End-to-End Arguments in System Design. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 195-206, 1984. (This paper argues for keeping the core as simple as possible.)

David D. Clark. The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols. Proc. ACM SIGCOMM 1988, pp. 106-114. (This paper presents the motivation and principles behind the Internet protocols.)

P. Molinero-Fernandez, Nick McKeown, and Hui Zhang. Is IP going to take over the world (of communications)? ACM HotNets 2002. (This paper proposes using circuits in the core and packets at the edges.)

Performance Models

This set of papers discusses some of the invariant properties that have been observed in Internet traffic and topologies.

V. Paxson and S. Floyd, Why We Don't Know How to Simulate the Internet, In Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference, December 1997. (This paper describes the challenges of modeling and simulating a large-scale network like the Internet.)

Alberto Medina, Ibrahim Matta, and John Byers. On the Origin of Power Laws in Internet Topologies. ACM Computer Communication Review, 30(2), April 2000. (This paper attempts to explain the causes behind power laws observed in Internet topologies.)

Liang Guo, Mark Crovella, and Ibrahim Matta. How does TCP Generate Pseudo-Self-Similarity?. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems - MASCOTS '01, Cincinnati, Ohio, August 2001. (This paper attempts to explain the high variability in TCP traffic.)

Naming and Addressing

This set of papers discusses the important topic of naming and addressing, an issue that continues to cause many of the current Internet's problems!

John Day, Ibrahim Matta, and Karim Mattar. "Networking is IPC": A Guiding Principle to a Better Internet. In Proceedings of ReArch'08 - Re-Architecting the Internet, Madrid, SPAIN, December 2008. Co-located with ACM CoNEXT 2008. (This paper views layers as distributed IPC facilities.)

Jerome H. Saltzer. On The Naming and Binding of Network Destinations. in Pier Ravasio et al., editors. Local Computer Networks. North Holland, Amsterdam, 1982, pages 311-317. RFC version. (This is the classical paper on naming and addressing.)

Vatche Ishakian, Ibrahim Matta, and Joseph Akinwumi. On the Cost of Supporting Mobility and Multihoming. In Proceedings of the IEEE GLOBECOM 2010 Workshop on Network of the Future, Miami, Florida, December 2010.

Connection Management / Signaling

This set of papers discusses TCP's connection management and alternatives to it.

Dag Belsnes. Single-Message Communication. IEEE Transactions on Communications, February 1976. (This paper presents several connection management schemes from 2-packet to 5-packet exchanges.)

John G. Fletcher and Richard W. Watson. Mechanisms for a Reliable Timer-Based Protocol. Computer Network Protocols Symposium, Liege (Belgium), February 1978. (This paper presents another alternative to TCP's connection management.)

Modeling and Analysis of Signaling Protocols

Ping Ji and Zihui Ge and Jim Kurose and Don Towsley. A Comparison of Hard-state and Soft-state Signaling Protocols. IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw. 2007. (This paper presents an analytical model to compare a range of hard-state vs. soft-state signaling approaches.)

John Lui, Vishal Misra, and Dan Ribenstein. On the Robustness of Soft State Protocols. ICNP 2004. (This paper explains why soft state was adopted in many Internet protocols.)

Gonca Gursun, Ibrahim Matta, and Karim Mattar. Revisiting A Soft-State Approach to Managing Reliable Transport Connections. In Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Protocols for Future, Large-Scale and Diverse Network Transports (PFLDNeT), Lancester, PA, November 2010.

Modeling and Analysis of Transport Policies

This set of papers uses probabilitic, optimization, or dynamic models to analyze the throughput behavior of rate-adaptive sources.

F. P. Kelly, A.K. Maulloo and D.K.H. Tan. Rate control in communication networks: shadow prices, proportional fairness and stability. Journal of the Operational Research Society 49 (1998), 237-252. (This paper explains TCP as a solution to a distributed optimization problem.)

Jitendra Padhye, Victor Firoiu, Don Towsley, Jim Kurose. Modeling TCP Throughput: A Simple Model and its Empirical Validation. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM '98. (This paper derives the well-known TCP throughput equation.)

D. Chiu and R. Jain. Analysis of the Increase/Decrease Algorithms for Congestion Avoidance in Computer Networks. Journal of Computer Networks and ISDN, Vol. 17, No. 1, June 1989, pp. 1-14. (This paper analyzes rate adaptation policies using discrete-time dynamical models.)

S. Kunniyur and R. Srikant. "End-to-end congestion control: utility functions, random losses and ECN marks". IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Oct. 2003, pp. 689-702. An earlier version appeared in INFOCOM 2000, Tel Aviv, Israel. (This paper characterizes the utility function for TCP Reno.)

Steven H. Low, Larry L. Peterson, Limin Wang. "Understanding Vegas: a duality model". Journal of the ACM, 2002. (This paper characterizes the utility function of TCP Vegas.)

J. Mo, R. La, V. Anantharam, and J. Walrand. Analysis and Comparison of TCP Reno and Vegas. IEEE INFOCOM 1999. (This paper analyzes loss-based congestion vs. delay-based congestion detection.)

Basic Congestion Control

This set of papers discusses the basic principles of congestion control and buffer management.

Van Jacobson and Michael J. Karels. Congestion Avoidance and Control. ACM SIGCOMM 1988, pp. 273-288. (This is the classical paper on TCP's congestion control algorithm.)

Kevin Fall and Sally Floyd. Simulation based Comparisons of Tahoe, Reno, and SACK TCP. ACM CCR, July 1996. (This paper compares the loss recovery of different versions of TCP.)

S. Floyd and V. Jacobson. Random Early Detection gateways for Congestion Avoidance. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, V.1 N.4, August 1993, p. 397-413. (This paper presents a randomized buffer management policy to help TCP's congestion control.)

Foundations and Misc. Links

Review of M/M/1 and variants covered by Prof. Azer Bestavros in CAS CS-350.

Queueing Analysis by Stallings.

Discrete-Event Simulation (by Udaya Shankar).

Confidence Intervals, S. Waner, Finite Mathematics and Applied Calculus.

F. Kelly. Mathematical modelling of the Internet. In "Mathematics Unlimited - 2001 and Beyond" (Editors B. Engquist and W. Schmid). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2001. 685-702.

The RED Home Page

ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification) in TCP/IP

TCP and ECN, ACM CCR, 1994.

The Vegas Home Page

Network Simulation Tools

The ns network simulator tutorial: http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/tutorial/index.html

ns by example: http://nile.wpi.edu/NS/

Congestion Avoidance Visualization Tool (CATV)

nsBench: NS-2 Workbench -- Graphical User Interface For Network Simulator.