Yan Chen, Assistant Professor
Room L459, Tech Institute, 491-4946. ychen@northwestern.edu
Office Hours: by appointment, Room L459, Tech Institute
· Lectures: Tuesday and Thursday 2-3:20pm, Room M128, Tech Institute
While the Internet has been an astounding engineering
triumph, it faces huge technical problems. As just one example, worldwide
spending on cleaning up after viruses, worms, and spam -- that is, spending on
coping with the consequences of connecting to the Internet -- is much larger
than the worldwide spending on Internet connectivity itself. The Internet
itself is fragile, insecure, and poorly optimized. To address these
challenges, the National Science Foundation has started “Future
Internet Design” program which aims to design and incrementally deploy
the next generation of Internet in 5 to 10 years with about $300M funding
anticipated. With this, the next golden Internet age is about to come.
To design the new Internet, first we need to
understand the operational problems of the current Internet. Remarkably,
there is very little quantitative data about the Internet's behavior. In
large part, this is because the Internet is operated by a loose federation of
tens of thousands of organizations, at turns both competing and cooperating
with each other to provide Internet service to end users.
This course is intended for both CS and ECE undergraduates and graduate students. Students from non-system/networking areas are particularly welcome. In this course, we will learn to systematically measure every aspect of the Internet's behavior, from the topology and intra- and inter-domain routing policies, to failures and misconfigurations, to various traffic it carries (viruses, worms, spam, spyware, botnet, etc.), and to the emerging edge network traffic (e.g., wireless and ad hoc network). A key insight is to leverage and integrate the various sources of information that leak out from service about their internal operation, in much the same way that astronomers infer stellar structure from the evidence which reaches our telescopes. In addition, we will learn the basic tools (both analytical and experimental) for measurement and analysis, at the beginning of the course. The techniques learned, especially the analytical part, can be used broadly in studying other domains.
Unlike normal research seminars which are purely paper reading based, we will leverage a recent textbook on Internet Measurement, which summarizes the important knowledge from thousands of papers, including the latest ones published last year! During the course, we will identify a list of open research problems for class projects or students can come up with their own projects. I will accomodate as much as I can, and just try to provide some guidance and necessary help. Hopefully, some projects will spawn a quarter-long undergrad research course which is purely guided and managed by undergrads like the RTFM.
Massive real-world anonymized router/gateway traffic data will be provided to analyze the behavior of the Internet, e.g., to detect both well-known and unknown viruses/worms/attacks, and even botnets and spywares. There will be no exams.
No exams for this class. The grading will be based on how much you learn from the course, not just how much you are able to achieve in the projects because different students have different background. Undergrad and grad students will be graded separately.
There is no required textbook. All reading will be from papers. Whenever possible, handouts and papers will be placed online on the web page. A schedule of assigned readings is available online.
Please refer to the slides of the first class for details. You must send the slides to me for review at least 24 hours before your presentation. There are some guidelines suggested by Fabián E. Bustamante which you will find useful.