Abstracts of Tutorials

Breaking News!

Marc Andreessen has bowed out of his tutorial due to business pressures. Attendees who have registered for the tutorial have the choice of: (a) getting a full refund, or (b) registering for any other tutorial (including a full day tutorial) at NO additional charge. Registerees will receive further information by email.

Contents

Hot topics in Networking , Raj Jain
Designing Protocols using Techniques from Distributed Systems, George Varghese

CANCELLED

Rethinking Client/Server Computing, Marc Andressen

Host-Network Interface Issues in High Performance Networks, Bruce Davie
Designing Secure Protocols, Radia Perlman and Charles Kaufman
Multimedia Networking, Aurel Lazar
The Ethernet Renaissance: Key Protocol Enhancements, Henry Yang
Congestion Management in High Speed Networks, K.K. Ramakrishnan

Hot Topics in Networking including ATM, Multimedia and Wireless


Dr. Raj Jain, Professor, Ohio State U. (Code MF-RJ)
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The field of networking is growing exponentially in both deployment and development of new technologies. This makes it difficult for most technical professionals to keep abreast of developments. This tutorial is designed to give technical professionals an overview of recent advances in networking. The tutorial begins with a discussion of trends in networking and then provides an overview of developments and technical issues in topics that are being hotly debated in the networking community. Raj Jain is a Professor of Computer and Information Science at the Ohio State University. Before joining the University in April 1994, he was a Senior Consulting Engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation and was involved in design and analysis of distributed systems and networking architectures. He received a Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in 1978 and has taught graduate courses in performance analysis at MIT. He is the Vice-Chair of ACM SIGCOMM and serves on the editorial boards of several journals. Dr. Jain holds several patents, and has written more than 35 papers on networking performance. He has delivered keynote addresses at several international conferences. He received the Computer Press Award for "The Best How- To-Book, Systems" for his 1991 book "The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis" published by Wiley, New York. He is an ACM Lecturer, an IEEE Distinguished Visitor and a Fellow of the IEEE. His latest book, "FDDI Handbook: High Speed Networking using Fiber and Other Media" has been published this year by Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.

Designing Protocols using Techniques from Distributed Algorithms


Dr. George Varghese, Associate Professor, Washington University , St. Louis
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There appears to be a wide separation between protocols designed for real networks and the many elegant distributed algorithms devised by the theoretical community. Practitioners claim that theoreticians work with toy problems, while theoreticians deplore the lack of formal design in real protocols. This course shows that techniques from distributed algorithms can be used systematically to design and understand real network protocols. George Varghese is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Washington University, St. Louis. His research interests are in protocol design and distributed systems. He received his Ph.D. from MIT. Before teaching at Washington University he was a member of the network advanced development group at Digital Equipment Corp. where he did research in emerging LAN technologies and routing algorithms.

Rethinking Client/Server Computing


Marc Andressen, Vice President of Technology and Co-founder, Netscape Communications Corporation
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This tutorial will look at contemporary client/server information systems on the Internet. We will show where they will be going over the next few years. We will also present how this new model for information publishing, database access, and interpersonal communication is being applied to the enterprise in addition to its popular use on the Internet. The tutorial will cover details of practice and theory for the most popular client/server information systems on the Internet. Marc Andressen, 23, is Vice President of Technology and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. Marc founded the company in April 1994 with Dr. James Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, Inc. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois, Marc helped to create the NCSA Mosaic research prototype for the Internet at the university's National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Offering a friendly point-and-click method for navigating the Internet and distributed free to network users, NCSA Mosaic gained an estimated two million users worldwide in just over one year.

Marc was named in 1994 as one of the top 50 people under the age of 40 by Time Magazine, and was named "Man of the Year" by MicroTimes Magazine. His company, Netscape Communications, was selected as one of the "Hot Companies in 1995" by Information Week Magazine. Marc earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science at the University of Illinois in 1993.

Host-Network Interface Issues in High Performance Networks


Dr. Bruce Davie, Director, Internetworking Research Group, Bell Communications Research
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It has become apparent that the interface between computers (hosts) and the network is a potential bottleneck in achieving high application-to-application performance. This tutorial will focus on the issues that must be considered in the design and implementation of high-performance host-network interfaces. A key theme is that one must consider the entire networking subsystem of the host, including host software and the network interface hardware.

The intended audience is graduate students, academic researchers, and industrial researchers and developers. It is expected that tutorial attendees would already have some familiarity with basic networking concepts. The goal of the tutorial is to provide an introduction to the many factors that must be considered in the design and implementation of the networking subsystem. These factors interact in complex ways, and only by understanding the full scope of the problem can high end-to-end performance be achieved. Attendees will learn how to make tradeoffs in designing networking subsystems by analyzing performance of the various components and of the whole system using real-world examples.

Bruce S. Davie is the Director of the Internetworking Research Group at Bell Communications Research (Bellcore). He has worked on performance analysis of packet-switched networks and is currently engaged in research on host-network interface architectures and protocols for gigabit networks. Since 1990 he has been a project manager for the Aurora gigabit testbed. He has authored many papers on host interface issues, designed and implemented the "Osiris" 622 Mbit/sec ATM host interface, and was a guest editor of the IEEE Journal of Selected Areas of Communications issue on host interfacing. He presented a tutorial titled "Host Interfacing for High Performance Networks" at the HPN '94 conference in Grenoble.

Designing Secure Protocols


Dr. Radia Perlman, Novell, Inc. and Charlie Kaufman , Lotus Corp.
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The international, intercorporate, information superhighway is a scary place. There are spies anxious to steal our secrets. There are tabloid reporters eager for a juicy scoop. There are criminals hoping to steal goods and services. There are maladjusted creatures that attempt to fill the emptiness of their lives by destroying our data and sabotaging the integrity of the network itself.

Yet there is hope, through the magic of cryptography. Cryptography, together with a properly designed protocol, allows us to protect information from disclosure and modification.

Charlie Kaufman and Radia Perlman are coauthors of the recently published book "Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World". They spent many years working in the network architecture group at Digital Equipment Corporation where Charlie designed security protocols and Radia designed routing protocols, including the spanning tree algorithm used by bridges.

Radia Perlman is currently at Novell, Inc., designing routing, distributed database replication, and security protocols. Her Ph.D. thesis at MIT was on the design of a practical routing protocol invulnerable to a denial of service attack. She is the author of "Interconnections: Bridges and Routers".

Charlie Kaufman is currently at Iris, Inc., a subsidiary of Lotus Corp., where he is security architect for Lotus Notes. He is the chair of the IETF working group designing security for the World Wide Web.

Multimedia Networking


Dr. Aurel A. Lazar, Department of Electrical Engineering and Center for Telecommunications Research, Columbia University
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This tutorial is intended for researchers in industry and academia involved in the study, design and implementation of scalable multimedia networking architectures supporting interoperable exchange mechanisms for interactive and on demand multimedia applications with quality of service requirements.

Multimedia networks are enabled by two basic technologies: networking and multimedia computing. We will limit ourselves to a scenario of multimedia networks with Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) based transport, such as already seen in broadband ATM LANs, and draw upon the xbind model for an open signalling architecture. xbind provides an infrastructure for building open multimedia computing platforms that support interactive multimedia applications dealing with synchronized, time-based media on top of a heterogeneous distributed environment with quality of service capabilities.

Guaranteeing Quality of Service in multimedia networks calls for a complete end-to-end solution. Therefore, our presentation will begin with a reference model for network architectures called the XRM. The XRM provides an appropriate context for discussing the main issues arising in network control, network management and media transport protocols as well as their interactions. The distinctive feature of our tutorial will be a detailed discussion of quality of service abstractions both for the networking and for the computing platform, middleware (binding), and multimedia service management issues. The presentation will be supported by examples from our own implementations on various ATM platforms. Further information about this tutorial is available here.

Aurel A. Lazar is a professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. His research interests span both theoretical and experimental studies of telecommunication networks and multimedia systems. The theoretical research he conducted during the 1980's pertains to the modeling, analysis and control of broadband networks. He formulated optimal flow and admission control problems and, by building upon the theory of point processes, derived control laws for Markovian queueing network models in single control and also game theoretic settings. He was the chief architect of two experimental networks, generically called MAGNET. This work introduced traffic classes with explicit quality of service constraints to broadband switching and led to the concepts of schedulable, admissible load and contract regions in real-time control of broadband networks.

Professor Lazar is currently leading the COMET project of the Center for Telecommunications Research at Columbia University. The main focus of this work is on building an open signalling architecture that enables the rapid creation, deployment and management of multimedia applications with quality of service requirements.

The Ethernet Renaissance: Key Protocol Enhancements


Henry Yang, Technical Director, Digital Equipment Corp.
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This tutorial will focus on the most recent trends and developments in Ethernet and the support of Ethernet in new technology like ATM. We will cover both the myths and the realities in Ethernet. We will examine the key designs and protocol enhancements in Ethernet, including Fast Ethernet. We will review "the Capture Effect" and how it can be solved. Given the development in ATM, we will examine how ATM LAN Emulation works to support Ethernet. We will review the key concepts, advantages and case study on Switched Ethernet and Virtual Networks. We will review the comparisons of the key contemporary high speed networks, including Fast Ethernet, FDDI, 100BASE-VG, and ATM.

Henry Yang is a Senior Consulting Engineer and Technical Director in the Network Adapter Group of Digital Equipment Corporation. His research interests are in the issues of data link layer and overall network design. Mr. Yang is a recognized authority in the industry on issues relating to the data link layer. He has done seminal work in the invention of the Ethernet, FDDI, 100 Mbit Ethernet and other data link standards. He has worked on many network adapters and controller/transceiver chips, for Ethernet and FDDI, which were developed both by Digital and other vendors. He is one of the key architects responsible for Digital's Ethernet, Switched Ethernet Fast Ethernet, FDDI, and ATM.

Mr. Henry Yang received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering with Honors from the University of Toronto in 1976 and an M.S. degree in Computer Science from Northeastern University in 1986.He has published many papers on data link design. He has over 28 pending and issued patents in data link and system design areas. In 1991, he represented the U.S.A. at the 1991 Sino-American Seminar on Computer Science and Electronic Technology held in Beijing, China. He has taught several High Speed LAN tutorials at the IEEE LCN conference and at InterOp.

Congestion Management in High Speed Networks


Dr. K.K. Ramakrishnan, AT&T Bell Laboratories
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The problem of congestion management has been a particularly active area of research for the last decade. The real problems of managing congestion in the Internet and other connectionless networks resulted in the development of several congestion control and avoidance techniques, the most widely implemented of which is Van Jacobson's Slow Start. Networks are getting faster, are more richly interconnected and are growing in scale every day. The larger bandwidth-delay products for these high speed networks poses a continuing challenge for flow and congestion management algorithms. While congestion control still attracts widespread research interest, progress has been made in understanding the problem. We understand more fully the behavior and effectiveness of window-based schemes, and a new field of research has opened in the design and analysis of rate based flow control algorithms.

Another fundamental change over the same time frame is the development of switched networks, such as ATM. The issue of dealing with congestion in connection oriented networks, apparently easier, is more complicated by the need to address qualities of service. Much of the recent work in congestion control has been in the context of ATM flow and congestion control, appearing in the literature and also under the auspices of the ATM Forum.

We will review the work done in the past decade in flow and congestion control and avoidance and examine recent work in congestion management for ATM.

K. K. Ramakrishnan is a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Earlier, he was a Consulting Engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation, and was most recently a Technical Director for High Performance Networks. His research interests are in the performance analysis and design of algorithms for computer networks and distributed systems using queueing network models.

Dr. Ramakrishnan holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Bangalore University in India and an MS degree in Automation from the Indian Institute of Science in 1978. He was with Digital from 1983 to 1994, after completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. He has worked and published papers in load balancing, congestion control and avoidance, algorithms for FDDI, distributed systems performance and issues relating to network I/O. He has approximately 30 patents pending or issued in these areas. Dr. Ramakrishnan participates in the Internet Engineering Task Force and is a member of the End-End Group, as part of the Internet Research Task Force. He is a technical editor for IEEE Network Magazine.

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Last updated by S. Keshav on Thu Aug 24 18:24:11 EDT 1995