CS 680
Internet Systems Research
Sami Rollins
srollins@cs.usfca.edu
Spring 2007
Administrative Information
• Class web page
• Introductions
– What do you hope to get out of this class?
What is the Internet?
History of the Internet
• 1960s – circuit switched phone network – not useful
for timesharing computers
• 1961 – Kleinrock publishes paper on packet
switching
• 1967 – Roberts publishes plan for ARPAnet
• 1969 – first node (UCLA) on ARPAnet followed by
SRI, UCSB, and Utah
• 1972 – Kahn demonstrates ARPAnet which uses the
network-control protocol (NCP) to communicate
• 1972 – Tomlinson writes first e-mail program
History of the Internet
• early to mid-70s – other networks
introduced
• 1973 – Metcalfe begins work on Ethernet
• 1974 – Kahn and Cerf explore how to
connect several networks – begin
development of TCP/IP
History of the Internet
• early 80s – many efforts, including
NSFNET, to build networks to link
universities
• 1983 - “flag day” for transition from NCP to
TCP/IP
• late 80s – DNS maps IP address to name
History of the Internet
• 90s – ARPAnet ceases to exist, NSFNET
decommissioned and Internet backbone
traffic carried by commercial ISPs
• 1989 – Berners-Lee invents WWW based
on ideas by Bush (1945) and Nelson (60s)
Research
• What is research?
• How is research different from what you do
in your other classes?
– New ideas
– Proof that they work
Research in CS
• Traditionally, three areas in CS
– Theory
– Systems
– Applications/AI
Systems Research
• Motivation
– What's the problem and why is it interesting?
• Design
– What is your solution and how is it new and interesting?
• Implementation
– How do you make your solution actually solve a problem?
Provides proof-of-concept, though there are likely to be other
implementations.
• Evaluation
– Is your solution really better than other solutions? How do you
measure its performance (metrics)? What affects its behavior
(parameters)?
Example: A New Algorithm/Architecture
• Examples: routing for P2P search, ranking of web search
results, back-end cluster architecture
• Motivation – old algorithms are too slow, use too many
resources, don't work for a particular scenario
• Design – how does your algorithm/architecture work, how
do components interact in your system
• Implementation – how do you prove your
algorithm/architecture is feasible?
• Evaluation – compare to other existing algorithms or to a
naive approach, may evaluate via simulation
Example: A Measurement Study
• Examples: gather data about traffic on P2P networks
• Motivation – understand how people use
applications/systems/networks to facilitate better design
• Design – anything interesting about how data is gathered?
• Implementation – how is your data gathering tool
implemented?
• Evaluation (Results) – lots of graphs classifying data
Example: Totally New System
• Examples: Turducken
• Motivation – can be hard to define, often
“cool to have”
• Design/Implementation – were you about to
actually build it?
• Evaluation – can be really hard! nothing to
compare to
Related Work
• Very important!
• Anything you think of has been thought of
before
• Don't do work that's already been done
• Find out what other people are doing!
Related Work
• Conferences are main publication venue for
CS
– Sigcom, Infocom, Mobicom, OSDI, NSDI,
SOSP, Usenix, MobiSys, WWW, Ubicomp,
Pervasive, SigIR, ACM Multimedia, Mobihoc,
Sigmetrics, ICDCS
• Journals – Transactions on X
Reading Papers
• Once is never enough
• Identify contribution
– How is this work new?
• How could you improve upon this work?
Summary Format (Benson)
• What are the most important points made in the paper (at least 3)?
• What are the main weaknesses of the paper? Do you believe the
assumptions and results? If not, why not?
• If possible, compare this work with other work that you have heard
about. If you chased down additional information on this topic, what
was it?
• List three questions or points that you plan to bring up in the
discussion.
• Place a number for each item below corresponding to your evaluation.
– Quality of presentation, Technical contribution, Novelty of ideas,
Overall
Latex
• Lots of on-line tutorials
• Miktex for windows
• To compile into pdf document:
pdflatex eval.tex