Reading

Note: The links to many research papers direct you to the ACM Digital Library or IEEE Xplore. If you are accessing these site from a computer on the UMass network, you can get direct access. If that fails, please access the sites via the UMass library page. If that fails, too, try Google Scholar.

Network Measurement:

• kc claffy, Greg Miller, and Thompson Kevin, “The nature of the beast: Recent traffic measurements from an internet backbone,” in Proc. of 1998 INET Conference, Geneva, Switzerland, June 1998.

Interconnects: Input and Output Queuing:

• Nick McKeown, Pravin Varaiya, and Jean Walrand, “Scheduling cells in an input-queued switch,” IEEE Electronics Letters, vol. 29, no. 25, pp. 2174–2175, Dec. 1993.

Routers: Prefix Lookup Algorithms:

• Miguel Á. Ruiz-Sánchez, Ernst W. Biersack, and Walid Dabbous, “Survey and taxonomy of IP address lookup algorithms,” IEEE Network, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 8–23, Mar. 2001.

Routers: Flow Classification Algorithms:

• Pankaj Gupta and Nick McKeown, “Algorithms for packet classification,” IEEE Network, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 24–32, Mar. 2001.

Routers: Scheduling Algorithms II:

• Jon C. R. Bennett and Hui Zhang, “WF2Q: Worst-case fair weighted fair queueing,” in Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM 96, San Francisco, CA, Mar. 1996, pp. 120–128.

Next-Generation Internet: Architectures

• Anja Feldmann, “Internet clean-slate design: what and why?,” ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 59–64, July 2007.

Before You Start

The following links point to various resources regarding how to read scientific paper. Some of the are aimed at research papers in the "real sciences," but are still applicable to network-related papers.

• Nice Flash-tutorial on how to read a paper.
• How to read a scientific paper. Good overview on how to evaluate a paper.
• On reading papers in engineering.

One important skill to learn as a graduate student is the ability to discern what information in a document is important and what is not (unless you have infinite time...). While textbooks are usually written in such a way that every page has some relevant information, research papers have a different structure. Make sure to focus on the main idea of the paper (What is the contribution? Why is this work important? How does the main desing/algorithm/measurement work? What are the results/conclusions?). You can put less emphasis on less important things (detailed methodology, proof for algorithms, etc.).