Category Archives: Reviews

Floodless in SEATTLE: A Scalable Ethernet Architecture for Large Enterprises

C. Kim, M. Caesar, J. Rexford, "Floodless in SEATTLE: A Scalable Ethernet Architecture for Large Enterprises," ACM SIGCOMM Conference, (August 2008). [PDF]

Summary

SEATTLE is an enterprise network architecture that combines the scalability of IP networks with the simplicity of Ethernet without incurring respective drawbacks. It uses flat address space to provide plug-n-play functionality and … Continue Reading ››

Detailed Diagnosis in Enterprise Networks

S. Kandula, R. Mahajan, P. Verkaik, S. Agarwal, J. Padhye, P. Bahl, "Detailed Diagnosis in Enterprise Networks," ACM SIGCOMM Conference, (August 2009). [PDF]

Summary

Diagnosis of generic and application-specific faults in networked systems is known to be notoriously hard due to dynamic and complex interactions between components. This paper presents NetMedic, a system that enables … Continue Reading ››

Congestion Control for High Bandwidth-Delay Product Networks

D. Katabi, M. Handley, C. Rohrs, "Congestion Control for High Bandwidth-Delay Product Networks," ACM SIGCOMM Conference, (August 2002). [PDF]

Summary

Regardless of gateway queueing schemes, TCP becomes inefficient and suffers from instability as per-flow product of bandwidth and delay increases. The main reason is that the existing TCP queueing mechanisms are not fast enough to … Continue Reading ››

Random Early Detection Gateways for Congestion Avoidance

S. Floyd, V. Jacobson, "Random Early Detection Gateways for Congestion Avoidance," IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, (August 1993). [PDF]

Summary

Random Early Detection or RED detects impending congestion based on average queue size and notifies connections of congestion through binary feedback by dropping packets or by marking bits in headers. To this end, RED uses two … Continue Reading ››

Core-Stateless Fair Queueing: Achieving Approximately Fair Bandwidth Allocations in High Speed Networks

I. Stoica, S. Shenker, H. Zhang, "Core-Stateless Fair Queueing: Achieving Approximately Fair Bandwidth Allocations in High Speed Networks," ACM SIGCOMM, (August 1998). [PDF]

Summary

Fair resource (bandwidth, buffer etc.) allocation algorithms (e.g., Fair Queueing) in routers usually need to manage large number of states, buffers, and has to do packet scheduling on a per … Continue Reading ››

Analysis and Simulation of a Fair Queueing Algorithm

A. Demers, S. Keshav, S. Shenker, "Analysis and Simulation of a Fair Queueing Algorithm," Internetworking: Research and Experience, 1 (1990), pp. 3-26.

Summary

Congestion control in communication networks can be implemented at the source, where flow control algorithms vary the sending rate, or at the gateway through routing and queueing algorithms. However, implementations at the source … Continue Reading ››

Congestion Avoidance and Control

V. Jacobson, M. Karels, "Congestion Avoidance and Control," ACM SIGCOMM Conference, (August 1988). [PDF]

Summary

This paper argues that much of the congestion-related problems (observed circa 1988 in LBL to UC Berkeley connections on 4.3 BSD machines) stem from wrong implementations and bugs in transport protocol, rather than the protocol itself. The authors present examples … Continue Reading ››

Analysis of the Increase and Decrease Algorithms for Congestion Avoidance in Computer Networks

D-M Chiu, R. Jain, "Analysis of the Increase and Decrease Algorithms for Congestion Avoidance in Computer Networks," Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 17 (1989), pp 1-14. [PDF]

Summary

"Low delay" and "high throughput", two main operating objectives of a computer network, are frequently hampered by congestion of packets. Once there is a congestion, it takes … Continue Reading ››

Interdomain Internet Routing

H. Balakrishnan, "Interdomain Internet Routing," MIT Lecture Notes, (January 2009).

Summary

Connectivity between different autonomous systems (ASes) with heterogeneous characteristics was the primary objective while designing the Internet. Interdomain routing enables end-to-end communication and global connectivity in a distributed manner through the dissemination of reachability information among the ASes/ISPs in the Internet. This lecture provides … Continue Reading ››

Understanding BGP Misconfiguration

R. Mahajan, D. Wetherall, T. Anderson, "Understanding BGP Misconfiguration," ACM SIGCOMM Conference, (August 2002).

Summary

Misconfigurations in BGP tables result in excessive routing load, connectivity disruption, and policy violation. However, misconfigurations are widely prevalent in the Internet without any systematic study of their characteristics. This paper presents an empirical study of the BGP misconfigurations with an … Continue Reading ››