STANFORD UNIVERSITY - SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING 

NETWORK ARCHITECTURES AND PERFORMANCE ENGINEERING

EE-384S / MS&E-334    -   Spring 2009

Announcements    |    Homework     |     Projects     |     Lectures     |     Papers

ADMINISTRATIVE INFORMATION

• Class Time: Tue/Thu 11:00-12:15pm, Room: Hewlett Teaching Center 103
• Professor:  Nick Bambos (bambos@stanford.edu)
  Office hours: Tue/Thu 2–3pm, Packard 238.
• Teaching Assistant: Carri Chan (cwchan@stanford.edu)
  Office hours: Mon/Wed 3-4pm in Packard 220

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This is a MS/PhD level course on high-performance engineering of computer network architectures. The course introduces important core methodologies for modeling and optimization of modern computer networks, and applies them to key design problems related to high-performance network engineering. 

The introduced network performance modeling, analysis, evaluation methodologies include:

• Stochastic modeling and Markov chains
• Queueing systems and networks
• Stochastic network simulation
• Stochastic scheduling and resource allocation
• Dynamic programming and network control
• Network optimization (flows, etc.)

Sample applications of the above methodologies to network engineering design include:

• Network traffic modeling, TCP/IP flow and congestion control, IP routing dynamics
• Admission control, quality of service support, packet scheduling/switching algorithms
• Power control and channel allocation in wireless networks, web access over wireless
• Content switching/routing, web caching, load balancing architectures
• Security, high-reliability network design, dependable computing systems
• Information service engineering, service architectures and performance.

 

We study selected key network design issues from the previous list, applying the aforementioned methodologies, stressing engineering intuition and developing modeling skills.

Reading material includes lecture notes and slides, book chapters, and research papers from major networking conference proceedings and archival research journals.

The homework and class project  aim to develop the network modeling intuition of the student and apply it on important network design problems in a systematic way.

TEXTBOOKS (recommended)

• L. Kleinrock, Queueing Systems, Vol. I & II, Wiley, 1975.
• S. Ross, Probability Models for Computer Science, Harcourt - Academic Press, 2002.
• J. Walrand & P. Varaiya, High-Performance Communication Networks, Morgan Kaufman, 2000 (2nd edition).