Network Reading Group

Tom Henderson is now organizing the network reading group. The current web page for the group is at http://iceberg.cs.berkeley.edu/netread.

Notes from previous meetings of the reading group are available for the following semesters:

Past Discussions

1/23/98 Todd Hodes
We will be discussing the Service Location Protocol (SLP) and the Wide-Area Service Location Protocol (WASRV). The two main documents are: Related Links:
1/30/98 Angie Schuett
We will discuss RTSP, the Real-Time Streaming Protocol.

Real Networks has a comprehensive page about the protocol at http://www.real.com/rtsp/index.html This has a link to the RTSP IETF draft, which is pretty long. Instead, I suggest you read the General Overview and Frequently Asked Questions pages.

Angie's discussion outline

2/6/98 Badri Badrinath
Also see:
2/13/98 Hari Balakrishnan
Tim Shepard, ``A Channel Access Scheme for Large Dense Packet Radio Networks''
2/20/98 Venkat Padmanabhan
We'll discuss the various proposals and efforts underway to incorporate differentiated services in the Internet. The relevant IETF material is available at: http://diffserv.lcs.mit.edu/

I would suggest that people just skim through the slides from the Dec 97 IETF. Much of the emphasis right now seems to be on defining the mechanisms. But it would be interesting to also consider how such mechanisms might actually be used to provide useful services to end hosts and applications. So come prepared with your ideas and suggestions!

Venkat's discussion outline.

2/27/98 Guest Speaker: Julio Navas from Rutgers University
Julio C. Navas and Tomasz Imielinski, ``GeoCast: Geographic Addressing and Routing''
3/6/98 Andrew Swan
Satish Kumar et al., ``The MASC/BGMP Architecture for Inter-domain Multicast Routing''

Andrew's discussion outline

3/20/98 Adam Costello
Christos Papadopoulos, ``An Error Control Scheme for Large-Scle Multicast Applications''
4/3/98 Adam Costello
Further discussion of subcast. From machines in the Berkeley CS department that mount /home/tomorrow/b, the paper is available here.
4/17/98 Tom Henderson
We'll discuss recent trends in supporting IP in optical networks, and the associated tradeoffs:
  • IP switching approaches (IP switching, tag switching, and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS))
  • IP over SONET (also known as Packet Over SONET(POS))
  • IP over optical
Primary paper: Comparison of IP-over-SONET and IP-over-ATM Technologies (Trillium white paper, http://www.trillium.com/w hats-new/wp_ip.html)

Additional references:

Tom's discussion outline
4/24/98 Steve McCanne
Hugh Holbrook and David Cheriton, ``EXPRESS Multicast: Making Multicast Economically Viable''
Slides are available from Holbrook's Express Multicast web p age
5/1/98 Discussion led by Mark Stemm
Srini Seshan, Mark Stemm, and Randy Katz, ``Benefits of Transparent Content Negotiation in HTTP'' Please consider the paper as draft-quality and don't redistribute it to anyone.

The basic idea is that a future version of HTTP will support negotiation of web objects. Using this mechanism, clients can request smaller versions of web documents to reduce download times, and servers can proactively serve out smaller versions of web documents to reduce bandwidth requirements, leading to a greater throughput under periods of high load. In the paper, we look at how significant these benefits can be.

5/15/98 Discussion led by Rainer Ludwig
Hari Balakrishnan, Venkat Padmanabhan, Srinivasan Seshan, and Randy H. Katz, ``A Comparison of Mechanisms for Improving TCP Performance over Wireless Links.''

Links of Interest