Content
Please attend two lectures or a lecture plus a seminar to complete the module.
Lectures
a) Datacenter networking and Software-Defined Networks:
Communication networks have evolved significantly over the last years. In particular, Software-Defined Networks introduced a more flexible, logically centralized and consolidated control of the network, unlike traditional networks where the control plane operates in a decentralized manner. Innovations are especially fast in datacenter networks, which are typically under a single administrative domain and where emerging technologies are easier to deploy. Besides software-defined control and network virtualization technologies (such as VxLANs), datacenter networks typically use different congestion control and routing protocols. Often, these protocols or even the optical network topology itself (in case of reconfigurable datacenters) are optimized to serve specific datacenter traffic workloads, such as batch processing jobs, distributed machine learning and training. In this course, you will first learn about the Internet control plane in general (including e.g. IP, MPLS networks). We will then discuss software-defined networks, programmable dataplanes (P4), and network virtualization, before we focus on datacenter networks, which is our main topic in this course. In addition to the conceptual parts, this course also provides a significant hands-on experience in simulating datacenter networks and testing new protocol designs. Depending on the time, we will discuss some concepts of wireless and cellular network control.
b) Internet and Network Security:
As common utilization of the Internet broadens, the threat from malicious programs and Users increases. To counteract this development during the design of new applications and technologies, we will try to identify and discuss the different attacks and threats (worms, viruses, denial of service). Based on that countermeasures (e.g., firewalls, network intrusion detection/prevention systems, scanners) are introduced and the challenges they are facing are explained. Besides active security tools, secure protocols (e.g., SSL, Kerberos, TLS, VPN, IPsec, WLAN Security) key management approaches and the security of different Internet services (e.g. E-Mail, SSH, VoIP, Network Storage) will be analyzed. In addition to the Internet, we will also consider threats specific to datacenter networks and enterprise networks.
c) Internet Measurements and Evaluation of Networked Systems:
This lecture deals with the following questions: How does Internet traffic look like, how traffic in datacenters? Are there some characteristic properties? How and where is it possible to improve the Internet, and how can those improvements be tested? How can the previous questions be addressed, and what technical challenges does one face while monitoring? How can data privacy be ensured? Is there something to bear in mind when analyzing such measurements in a statistical manner? Which methodologies can we use to evaluate new networking protocols? How to set up an experiment? What is the difference between analytical evaluations, simulations and emulations? How to model demand and human mobility? Is it possible to generate realistic traffic based on statistical characteristics?
Seminars
During the seminar „Network Architectures" students acquire scientific knowledge on a small topic on their own, prepare it as a paper, and give a talk on what they learned. Dealing with recent original scientific literature as well as practice and preparation of professional talks are the key benefits for the students. The successful completion of the seminar enables the participants to understand recent, complex and professional literature and to summarize the work. The participation in the seminar includes continuous attendance and active participation, an accepted seminar paper, and its presentation.
The seminar is offered once every term in one of the following variants:
Focus Measurement:
This seminar deals with recent findings and scientific research papers concerning evaluation of networked and distributed systems, reproducability of scientific experiments and Internet measurements. In general these topics are also about measuring and analyzing special characteristics (e.g., throughput, delay, jitter, RTTs, topology) of Internet traffic.
Focus Security:
Communication networks such as the Internet, enterprise networks, datacenter networks, or wireless networks, have become a crtitical infrastructure of our digital society. Accordingly, the networks need to meet stringent dependability and security requirements.
Network security is hence crucial and revolves around the policies, processes and practices adopted to prevent, detect and monitor unauthorized access, misuse, modification, or denial of a computer network and network-accessible resources.
The goal of this seminar is to get an understanding of the state-of-the-art technology used by both attackers and defenders of networks. To this end, we will critically discuss recent scientific publications in this area, review open-source implementations, and study whether existing methodologies and evaluations can be reproduced. The seminar hence will consist of discussions, presentations and hands-on and research components.
Focus Algorithms and Optimizations:
This seminar deals with recent findings and scientific research papers concerning network algorithms and optimization for networks. Topics range from improvement of routing algorithms over topology detection and emulation to traffic engineering or wireless medium access.
