IEEE Infocom 2001 Tutorials

Sunday, 22 April, Morning
Tutorial T1: Wireless Home Networks: Technologies and Applications

Leandros Tassiulas (University of Maryland)

In the tutorial, we will present communication network architectures, technologies and applications encountered in home, office and personal area networks. We will review existing and developing technologies including 802.11x, HomeRF, bluetooth, DECT. The focus will be on the comparative advantages and disadvantages of the different technologies from the point of view of the applications as well as of usability. Furthermore we will review the different devices (information appliances) that might be parts of this network and address the issue of how they fit to the different technologies. The issues of power consumption and ease of deployment as well as reconfigurability will be addressed in each case.

Leandros Tassiulas (S'89, M'91) obtained the Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece in 1987, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1989 and 1991 respectively. From 1991 to 1995 he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY. In 1995 he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, where he is now an Associate Professor. He holds a joint appointment with the Institute for Systems Research and is a member of the Center for Satellite and Hybrid Communication Networks, established by NASA. His research interests are in the field of computer and communication networks with emphasis on wireless communications (terrestrial and satellite systems) and high-speed network architectures and management. Dr. Tassiulas received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Initiation Award in 1992, an NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award in 1995, and an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 1997. He coauthored a paper that received the INFOCOM `94 best paper award.

Sunday, 22 April, Afternoon
Tutorial T2: Quality of Service (QoS) Support for Broadband Wireless Networks

Victor O.K. Li (University of Hong Kong)

In the future, broadband wireless networks will be an integral part of the global communication infrastructure. With the rapid growth in popularity of wireless data services, and the increasing demand for multimedia applications, it is expected that future wireless networks will provide services for heterogeneous classes of traffic with different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Currently there is an urgent need to develop new technologies for providing QoS differentiation and guarantees in wireless networks. Wireless communication poses special problems that do not exist in wireline networks, such as time-varying channel capacity and location-dependent errors. Although many mature algorithms are available for wireline networks, they are not directly applicable in wireless networks because of these special problems. This tutorial provides a comprehensive and in-depth survey on recent research in QoS support in wireless networks, focusing on wireless scheduling. Various representative algorithms are examined. Their themes of thoughts, and pros and cons are compared and analyzed. Some open questions and future research directions are addressed.

Victor O.K. Li was born in Hong Kong in 1954. He received SB, SM, EE and ScD degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1977, 1979, 1980, and 1981, respectively. He joined the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, California, USA in February 1981, and became Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of the USC Communication Sciences Institute. Since September 1997 he has been with the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, where he is Chair Professor of Information Engineering at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and Managing Director of Versitech Ltd., the technology transfer and commercial arm of the University. He also serves on various corporate boards. His research is in information technology, including high-speed communication networks, personal communication systems, and distributed multimedia systems. Sought by government, industry, and academic organizations, he has lectured and consulted extensively around the world. Prof. Li chaired the Computer Communications Technical Committee of the IEEE Communications Society 1987-1989, and the Los Angeles Chapter of the IEEE Information Theory Group 1983-1985. He chaired the Steering Committee of the International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (IC3N) 1992-1997, and was General Chair of the 1st Annual IC3N, June 1992. He also served as Technical Program Chair of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) Personal Communication Ser vices Symposium, June 1995, and Chair of the 4th IEEE Work shop on Computer Communications, October 1989. Prof. Li has served as an editor of IEEE Network and of Telecommunication Systems, guest editor of IEEE JSAC and of Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, and is now serving as an editor of ACM Wireless Networks, IEEE JSAC Wireless Communications Series, and IEEE Communication Surveys. In Hong Kong, Prof. Li serves on the Innovation and Technology Fund (Electronics) Vetting Committee, Engineering Panel of the Research Grants Committee, Technology Advisory Panel of the Hong Kong Industrial Technology Centre Corp., and Task Force for the Hong Kong Academic and Research Network (HARNET) Development Fund of the University Grants Committee. He was a Distinguished Lecturer at the University of California at San Diego, at the National Science Council of Taiwan, and at the California Polytechnic Institute. He has given keynote addresses and served on the advisory boards of numerous international conferences. He was elected an IEEE Fellow in 1992.

Sunday, 22 April, Afternoon
Tutorial T3: Traffic Engineering in IP/MPLS Networks

Anwar Elwalid (Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies)

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are facing the challenge of designing their networks to support increasing customer demands for fast, reliable and quality-differentiated services. The goals are to optimize resource usage and guarantee reliable delivery of delay-sensitive (e.g. voice and video) as well as best effort traffic. Recently, there have been major advances in the Internet transport architecture and quality of service support mechanisms which address the stated goals. Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a networking technology, which simplifies packet forwarding by integrating switching and routing, and enables network optimization using traffic engineering and constraint-based routing. MPLS support of Differentiated Services (DiffServ) is being defined, and MPLS signaling is being extended to provide setup and restoration of light paths in optical networks. This tutorial covers emerging MPLS-based networking models and solutions, and, when possible, explores their applications within optimization frameworks.

We first review the evolution of traffic engineering and QoS support in traditional IP networks. We then give an introduction to MPLS, its concepts and protocols, and review its advantages in traffic engineering over traditional IP and IP-over-ATM networks. We will review off-line global optimization and constraint-based routing algorithms for engineering multi-class, multi-customer traffic and their applications to Virtual Private Networks. We will consider adaptive mechanisms for load balancing of backbone traffic based on real-time measurements and discuss related stability and optimality issues. The latest on MPLS support of DiffServ and the role and application of MPLS in IP over optical networking will be reviewed.

Anwar Elwalid is with Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, where he is a DMTS (Distinguished Member of Technical Staff). He received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Polytechnic Institute of New York, Brooklyn, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, New York. Since 1991 he has been with the Mathematics of Networks and Systems Research Department at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he developed theory and algorithms for network resource management and QoS support, and for the analysis and engineering of multimedia traffic. He holds several patents. His current research interests include IP and optical network architectures, traffic engineering and stochastic systems. He has been active in the Traffic Engineering and MPLS Working Groups of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). He served on the executive and technical program committees of several conferences. Dr. Elwalid is a member of Tau Beta Pi (National Engineering Honor Society), Sigma Xi, IEEE and the ACM (from which he received a best paper award).

Sunday, 22 April, Full Day
Tutorial T4: TCP Congestion Controls: Algorithms and Models

Steven Low (Caltech) and Matthew Roughan (AT&T Research)

A congestion control is a set of distributed algorithms to share network resources among competing users. They adapt to fluctuations in the capacity of, and the demand for, these resources, preventing congestion collapses which can cripple a network. An ideal congestion control is simple, robust, and scalable, but provides fair and efficient access to resources, and converges rapidly and without instability. The two primary components of a congestion control are a link algorithm executed by network devices such as routers or switches, and a source algorithm executed by host computers or edge devices. Link algorithms detect congestion and feed back information to users, and in response, source algorithms adjust the rate at which user traffic is injected into the network. The basic design issue is what to feed back and how to react. The primary flow control of the Internet is the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) f low control scheme. In this tutorial, we will: (1) describe the general issues in designing flow controls: fairness (maxmin fairness, proportional fairness), optimality, robustness, scalability, stability and convergence; (2) describe the operations and design rationales of various TCP congestion controls, both the source algorithms (Tahoe, Reno, Vegas, NewReno, SACK, Rate-Halving), and link algorithms (RED, RIO, FRED, ARED, SRED, BLUE, REM); (3) explain some of the key performance issues for TCP, problems in wireless TCP and proposed solutions; (4) explain recently developed analytical models of the TCP congestion control and how they may be used to understand and predict network performance, such as stability, window dynamics, and fairness; and (5) provide a coherent survey of the recent optimization approaches to congestion control and their application to the Internet, including schemes based on penalty function methods and on duality theory. The tutorial will consist of two parts. Part 1 will be descriptive and surveys various deployed and proposed schemes. Part 2 will be analytical and surveys various mathematical models developed in the past few years.

Steven Low received his B.S. degree from Cornell University and PhD from the University of California Berkeley in 1992, both in electrical engineering. He has been a consultant to NEC, CA, in 1991 and was with AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, from 1992 to 1996, with the University of Melbourne, Australia, from 1996-2000, and is now an Associate Professor in the CS and EE Departments at Caltech. He has held visiting academic positions in the US, Hong Kong, and Australia, and has consulted with companies in Australia and the US. He was a co-recipient of the IEEE William R. Bennett Prize Paper Award in 1997 and the 1996 R&D 100 Award. He is on the editorial board of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. He has been a guest editor of the IEEE Journal on Selected Area in Communications and on the program committee of several conferences. His research interests are in the control and optimization of communications networks and protocols, and network security and privacy.

Matthew Roughan received his B.Sc. (Hon.) in 1990 and PhD in 1994 in Applied Mathematics both from the University of Adelaide, in Australia. From 1994 to 1996 he worked at the Cooperative Research Centre for Sensor Signal and Information Processing. From 1997 to 2000 he worked at the Ericsson/RMIT Software Engineering Research Centre in Melbourne, Australia, and then at the EMULab in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Melbourne, Australia, as a Senior Research Fellow. He is now with AT&T Research, Shannon Lab, NJ. His research interests are in stochastic modeling and the performance of high speed networks.

Monday, 23 April, Morning
Tutorial T5: Video Over IP

Magda El-Zarki (University of California at Irvine)

This tutorial will focus on a discussion of modern video encoding techniques with particular emphasis on the MPEG4 compression algorithm. We will then outline video quality assessment methods and how this relates to the provision of video services including the pre and post processing of video streams for transmission over lossy networks. The tutorial will conclude with a discussion on video transport over IP based networks and QoS issues.

Magda El Zarki received the B.E.E. from Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt in 1979 and the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, New York City, NY in 1981. She worked from 1981-1983 as a communications network planner in the Department of International Telecommunications at Citibank in New York City. She joined Columbia University in 1983 as a research assistant in the Computer Communications Research Laboratory. She received her Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering in December 1987. Currently she holds the position of Professor in the Department of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, where she is involved in doing research in telecommunication networks. Prior to that she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where she also held the position of Director of the Telecommunications Program. From 1992 - 1996 she held the position of Professor of Telecommunications at the Technical University of Delft, Delft, Netherland. Ms. El Zarki is a member of the IEEE, the Association for Computing Machinery and Sigma Xi. She is an editor for several journals in the telecommunications area, and is actively involved in many international conferences. She was on the board of governors of the IEEE Communications society and was the vice chair of the IEEE Tech. Committee for Computer Communications.

Monday, 23 April, Afternoon
Tutorial T6: Bluetooth and Pervasive Wireless Networking

Mahmoud Naghshineh (IBM Research)

In this tutorial we will provide an overview of the Bluetooth Industry standard, set of protocols, usage models, applications, and related research issues. After a short discussion on business and technology environment related to short range wireless, we will provide an overview of the Bluetooth protocol specifications and stack components including Bluetooth radio, link controller and baseband, link management protocol, Host controller interface, L2CAP and framing layer, RFCOMM and Service Discovery Protocol (SDP). Then we will discuss the audio and telephony control, and describe how Bluetooth leverages IrDA as well as TCP/IP stacks and applications. Next we describe Bluetooth profiles and the concept behind them. Finally we will provide an overview of a number of open research issues related to Bluetooth specifically, and short range wireless in general.

Mahmoud Naghshineh is a Senior Manager at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, where he currently manages the Pervasive Security and Networking Department. He joined IBM in 1988. Since then, he has worked in communication and networking protocols, fast packet-switched/broadband IP and ATM networks, short range Infrared/RF wireless and mobile networking, optical networking, QoS provisioning, call admission, routing, and resource allocation, network security and secure network processors. He has had several main technical contributions to IBM products in areas of networking technologies and software. He has contributed to IrDA, Bluetooth and IEEE standards. His current interests are Wireless Internet and Security. He received his doctoral degree form Columbia University, New York, in 1994. He is a senior member of the IEEE, the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Personal Communications Magazine, and the Program Co-Chair of MobiCom 2001. He has served as a technical editorial board member of many wireless and mobile networking/computing journals, as a member of technical program committee, session organizer and chairperson for many IEEE/ACM, NSF and Government conferences and workshops. Currently, he is an adjunct faculty member of the department of electrical engineering at Columbia University teaching a graduate course on wireless and mobile networking. He has published over 60 technical papers and holds a number of IBM awards and patents.

Monday, 23 April, Full Day
Tutorial T7: Control and Management for Optical Networks: An IP-Centric Approach

S. K. Biswas, D. Pendar akis, D. Saha and S. Sengupta (Tellium Inc.)

The Internet transport infrastructure is moving towards a model of high-speed routers interconnected by intelligent optical core networks. A consensus is emerging in the industry on utilizing IP-centric control plane within optical networks to support dynamic provisioning and restoration of lightpaths. Specifically, it is believed that IP routing protocols and Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) signaling protocols could be adapted for optical networking needs. At the same time, there are divergent views on how IP routers must interact with optical core networks to achieve end-to-end connectivity. This tutorial will focus on IP-centric control, specifically routing and signaling issues, of optical network and the architectural aspects of interconnecting client in devices, e.g., IP routers, ATM switches etc., over optical networks. It will cover the following topics. Network architecture & services: Optical mesh network architecture, dynamic light-path provisioning, fast optical layer restoration, emerging services -- dynamic network reconfiguration in response to changing traffic, bandwidth trading, optical virtual private networks.

Industry trends and evolution:

Increased intelligence of optical equipment, migration of time-critical operations from management-plane to control - plane, gradual replacement of rings with mesh topology.

Control plane issues:

Distributed and fast light-path provisioning, neighbor discovery and topology dissemination, sur vivability at different layers, connectivity bet ween different optical domains (NNI), connectivity between optical core and client networks (UNI), alternative solutions.

Case for IP-centric control plane:

Maximized re-usability of tried and tested protocols, accelerated development and deployment, simplified internetworking between optical and IP (packet forwarding) networks, distributed nature of IP protocols maximizes network survivability, challenges.

Lightpath routing protocols:

Protocols for neighbor and topology discovery, distributed and decentralized route computation. Standards activities in IETF and OIF. Link Management Protocol (LMP), optical extensions to link state routing protocols (OSPF, IS-IS).

Signaling protocols:

Generalized MPLS framework, optical extensions to CR-LDP/RSVP-TE, Optical User Network Interface (O-UNI) for lightpath signaling bet ween client net works (e. g. IP routers, ADM etc.) and the optical network. Status of standardization activities (IETF, OIF)

Restoration:

Types of restoration (e.g. dedicated/shared, span/path), routing of primary and backup paths, restoration signaling.

Monday, 23 April, Full Day
Tutorial T8: Principles of Multicast Protocols and Services

Mostafa Ammar (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Don Towsley (University of Massachussetts)

There is a growing demand for network support for multicast applications, those that involve three or more participating users. Examples of such applications include video streaming, teleconferencing, distributed games, software distribution, distributed database updates, and command/control systems. This tutorial will focus on the fundamental issues that arise when developing appropriate network support for these applications and the recent trends in their resolution. The most important of these issues relate to the scalability of proposed services and their suitability for applications including users with widely differing capabilities. We will begin by reviewing the Internet's IP multicast model and then focus on the problem of multicast routing and review some basic approaches that have been proposed. We will then focus on the following services required to support multicast communications: (1) support for continuous media (2) reliable data transfer (3) congestion control and flow control for heterogeneous users within a group and (4) secure communications. We will conclude with a brief description of multicast applications and how they may be built on top of the support services discussed earlier.

Mostafa H. Ammar is Professor of Computer Science with the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA. He received his Ph.D. Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, 1985 and the S.M.(1980) and S.B.(1978) degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. He has been with Georgia Tech since 1985. For the years 1980-82 he worked at Bell-Northern Research (BNR), in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, first as a Member of Technical Staff and then as a Manager of Data Network Planning. Dr. Ammar currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. He was the co-guest editor of the April 1997 issue of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication on "Network Support for Multipoint Communication" and was the Technical Program Co-Chair for the 1997 IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols. He is the co-author of the textbook "Fundamentals of Telecommunication Networks," published by John Wiley and Sons in 1994, and was the co-recipient of the Best Paper Award at the 7th WWWConference (1998).

Don Towsley holds a B.A. in Physics (1971) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science (1975) from University of Texas. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts in the Department of Computer Science. He has held visiting positions at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY (1982-1983); Laboratoire MASI, Paris, France (1989-1990); INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, France (1996); and AT&T Labs - Research, Florham Park, NJ (1997). His research interests include networks, multimedia systems, and performance evaluation. He has published extensively in all of these areas. He currently serves on the Editorial board of Performance Evaluation and has previously served on several editorial boards including the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. He was a Program Co-chair of the joint ACM SIGMETRICS and PERFORMANCE '92 conference. He is a member of ACM, ORSA and the IFIP Working Groups 6.3 and 7.3. He has received the 1998 IEEE Communications Society William Bennett Paper Award and several best conference paper awards from ACM SIGMETRICS. Last, he has been elected Fellow of both the ACM and IEEE.