MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Fall 2000 Catalogue Supplement

6.899 Computer Networks (H)

MW 11-12:30, Room 3-442
Prof. Hari Balakrishnan, Room NE43-510, x3-8713
Prereq.: 6.033 or equivalent and familiarity with network protocols
3-0-9

Qualifies as a subject in the Computer Systems Architecture Engineering Concentration

The goals of this subject are:

1. To understand the state-of-the-art in network protocols, architectures, and applications.

2. To understand how networking research is done.

3. To investigate novel ideas in the area via semester-long research projects.

The past few years have seen a remarkable growth in the global networking infrastructure. The Internet has grown from a research curiosity to something we all take for granted, beginning to become as essential as the ubiquitous telephone and utility networks. It has been able to withstand rapid growth fairly well and its protocols have been robust enough to accomodate applications that were unforeseen by the original Internet designers, such as the World Wide Web.

How does this global network infrastructure work and what are the design principles on which it is based? How do we make it work better in today's world? How do we ensure that it will work well in the future in the face of rapidly growing scale, heterogeneous network and device technologies (e.g., wireless links), and diverse applications? How should Internet systems and applications be designed to obtain the best possible performance both for themselves and for others using the infrastructure?

These are some issues that we will grapple with in this course. The emphasis will be on how we can networked systems, protocols, and applications should be designed, implemented, analyzed, and evaluated, in the face of the above challenges. In addition to the prerequsites, elementary probability and statistics will be helpful.