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These are a few of the topics that were discussed during class.
09/12/02: Towards an Active Network Architecture
 | What are the characteristics of an active network? |
| What is "technology push" and "application pull"? What
does this mean in the context of active networks? |
| What does an active network do in the context of a video compression
application? |
| What levels of programming abstraction are there? |
| How is the "program" distributed? What are "foundation
components"? |
| What is "sandboxing" and why is it necessary? |
| How could an active network be deployed? |
09/17/02: Smart Packets: Applying Active Networks to Network Management
| What does Moore's Law say? How is it relevant for active networks and
network management? |
| What does the ANEP header do? |
| What management applications could use active networks? |
| How does the traceroute application work in normal and in active networks? |
| What does the data path in an active router look like? Where are
scalability problems? |
| How is security achieved? |
| What does an active network testbed look like? |
09/19/02: A Scalable High-Performance Active Network Node
| Why is the proposed architecture scalable? |
| What does the data path look like? |
| Why does this architecture promise higher performance than the others we
have discussed? |
| Where does other active network software (e.g., ANTS) fit into this
architecture? |
| Why is the use of selectors similar to MPLS? |
| Where does the packet processing code come from? |
| How is "safe" execution achieved? |
09/24/02: Active Reliable Multicast
| What are problems with non-active multicast? What is NACK implosion? |
| How do the three components of ARM (data caching, NACK suppression, scoped
retransmission) solve these problems? |
| What is soft state? |
| How does the sender-receiver RTT play a role in multicast? |
| How does a partially active network help for ARM? |
09/26/02: An Active Router Architecture for Multicast Video Distribution
| How can wave video be scaled? Why does this not work with MPEG? What are
the benefits of MPEG in general? |
| How is this system different from reliable multicast? |
| How does the active router make the decision to forward or drop a packet? |
| How realistic is the test network? What is good about such a setup? |
| Why would a complete network simulation give more meaningful results? |
| What does the evaluation of bursts of cross traffic show? |
10/01/02: NodeOS and ABONE
| What are the functions of NodeOS, EEs, and AAs? |
| What are the design goals of the NodeOS? |
| How is memory and processing time managed and allocated to AAs? |
| How does the ABONE work? |
10/03/02: PLAN and SNAP
| What is the difference between safety and security? |
| How do PLAN and SNAP achieve safety and security? |
| How is resource consumption (CPU, memory, bandwidth) bound in PLAN and
SNAP? |
| What guarantees can be made by forcing the execution time to be
proportional to the packet size? |
| Why can applications not be checked for safety and security before
installation? |
| What do the measurement results show? |
10/08/02: Strong Security for Active Networks
| What is integrity, authenticity, privacy? |
| How impact does hop-by-hop and end-to-end integrity have on active
networking? What about privacy? |
| What are the trust issues in active networks? |
| Why do the authors propose to split the packet payload into fixed and
modifiable content? |
10/10/02: Darwin: Customizable Resource Management for Value-Added Network
Services
| Why do we need resource reservation? |
| Why should resources be allocated hierarchically? |
| How can computation and bandwidth be traded off? When is such a tradeoff
useful? |
| What are the functions of Xena, delegates, schedulers, and Beagle? |
10/17/02: Enabling Conferencing Applications on the Internet using an
Overlay Multicast Architecture
| How is overlay multicast different from IP multicast and active multicast? |
| What are the benefits and drawbacks of overlay networks? |
| Why is a mesh used instead of just a spanning tree? |
| How are bandwidth and latency used to determine the connections? How does
this influence the performance of the overlay network? |
| What do the measurements in the paper show? What is the rank order and why
is it used? |
| What kind of overhead is associated with overlay networks? |
11/12/02: Network Processors: IBM PowerNP and Intel IXP
| How is the parallelism in networking workloads reflected in network
processor architectures? |
| What are the key components of these network processors? |
| What are the differences between the PowerNP and the IXP? |
| What is the application domain for these network processors? |
| What kind of functions are implemented on co-processors? Why is it
worthwhile doing that? |
11/14/02: CommBench - A Telecommunications Benchmark for Network Processors
| Why do traditional processor benchmarks (e.g., SPEC) not capture
networking characteristics? |
| What applications are suitable for NP benchmarks? How can different levels
of processing be distinguished? |
| What benchmark metrics are relevant to network processors? |
| How is computational complexity defined in the context of CommBench? |
| What design implications can be drawn from the benchmark results? |
11/19/02: Scheduling Computations on a Software-Based Router
| How is scheduling done on a workstation processor with a typical operating
systems? Why does a network processor require a different approach? |
| What is live-lock and what causes it? How can it be prevented? |
| Why should input processing, forwarding, and link scheduling be handled by
independent processes/components? |
| What is batching and how does it help improve performance? What is the
draw-back of batching? |
11/21/02: Dynamic Hardware Plugins
| Why can/should we use FPGAs on programmable routers? |
| How do FPGAs compare to general purpose processors and ASICs in terms of
flexibility, performance, and development time? |
| What are the benefits of using hardware plugins instead of freely
programming the FPGA? |
| What does the data flow look like in the proposed architecture? |
11/26/02: Methodology and Simulator for the Study of Network Processors
| Why do we want to simulate network processor? |
| What components of the network processor should be simulated? |
| What is the basic architecture of Cisco's Toaster? |
| What traces are used and how were they obtained? |
| What do the simulation results yield? |
12/03/02: Design Space Exploration
| Why do analytic design space exploration? |
| What components of a network processor should be modeled? |
| What are possible optimization criteria? |
| What are arrival and service curves? |
| What is Pareto-optimal? |
12/05/02: Commercial Network Processors
| What characteristics are similar in most commercial NPs? |
| Why is it important to have a sophisticated software development kit for
NPs? |
| What are typical configurations for number of processors, on-chip cache,
clock rates, power consumption? |
| What trends can be observed for newer NP generations? |
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