CSE 222

Graduate Communication Networks

Midterm Project
Out: 2/6/01
Due: 2/18/01 by 11:59pm

Overview

The midterm project is based upon the popular ns network simulation tool. ns is widely used for networking research, and you will see results from ns simulations in many networking papers. Personal experience with ns will therefore help you understand and evaluate the papers that you read, as well as give you experience with using ns for your own research.

You can do the project alone or with a partner; the project is small enough that three people is overkill.

• Project assignment

Background Reading

Part of the project will be a comparison of different router queueing disciplines. One of them will be fair queueing, an excellent description of which is given by the following paper:

A. Demers, S. Keshav, and S. Shenker, Analysis and Simulation of a Fair Queueing Algorithm, Internetworking: Research and Experience, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 3-26, 1990.

You should read this paper when you get to the fair queueing part of the project. The goal is to give you experience exploring ideas from a research paper in your own work, something you'll do more extensively in the final project. For those who find fair queueing interesting, another (optional) excellent recent paper is:

I. Stoica, S. Shenker, and H. Zhang, Core-Stateless Fair Queueing: Achieving Approximately Fair Allocations in High Speed Networks, Proc. ACM SIGCOMM, Vancouver, Canada, September 1998.

Environment

It turns out that the Active Web machines cannot explicitly be enlisted for class use, so you will nominally have to do the project on the grad APE machines. I say nominally because you are welcome to do the project wherever you find Tcl/Tk and ns installed (or where you have installed them yourself). The details for using ns on the APE machines are in Dmitrii's tutoral page.