There are no official texts for the course. Students are expected to read research papers. The following books can be useful in providing relevant background:
The schedule and specific readings are tentative and may change over the course of the semester.
| Date | Topics | Readings | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wed 08/26 | Introduction and course overview |
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| Fri 08/28 | Reviewing relevant concepts |
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| Part 1: Historical perspective | |||
| Wed 09/02 | Refresher on classical principles |
End to end principle, Design philosophy | |
| Fri 09/04 | Active networking |
Active networking (write-up required), Active networking and E2E (no write-up required) |
Instructions for course project |
| Part 2: Switching infrastructure | |||
| Wed 09/09 | Software-defined networking (SDN) concepts |
4D | Optional -- Ethane |
| Fri 09/11 | SDN technology |
OpenFlow, NOX | Optional -- Onix |
| Wed 09/16 | SDN in use |
Google's B4 | Optional -- B4 and after, Espresso, SWAN, Jupiter |
| Fri 09/18 | Software switches |
Routebricks | Optional -- Click |
| Wed 09/23 | Programmable dataplane hardware |
RMT | Optional -- NetFPGA |
| Fri 09/25 | P4 applications |
NetCache OR Sailfish | Optional -- NetChain, NetLock, NoPaxos, Silkroad, BeauCoup OR Elmo |
| Wed 09/30 | Flexible packet scheduling |
PIFO, UPS | Optional -- ApproxFQ, SP-PIFO |
| Part 3: Networking infrastructure at endhosts | |||
| Fri 10/02 | High performance network stack I (kernel overheads and optimizations) |
Host network stack overheads | Optional -- Megapipe |
| Wed 10/07 | High performance network stack II (software kernel bypass) |
IX | Optional -- mTCP, TAS |
| Fri 10/09 | High performance network stack III (leveraging eBPF) |
XDP | First progress report on the project due. |
| Wed 10/14 | RDMA I |
Azure RDMA | Optional -- FaRM,Meta RDMA, eRPC, Microsoft RoCE experience |
| Fri 10/16 | RDMA II (Issues) |
IRN | Optional -- DCP |
| Wed 10/21 | RDMA III (RDMA for AI) |
NVIDIA Spectrum-X | Optional -- IBM Vela, Alibaba Stellar |
| Fri 10/23 | Ultra Ethernet |
Ultra Ethernet | |
| Wed 10/28 | Software NIC |
SoftNIC | Optional -- Carousel |
| Fri 10/30 | Network Virtualization and Host SDN |
NV | Optional -- OpenVSwitch, VFP, Andromeda |
| Wed 11/04 | Software Solution for Host Networking |
Google's SNAP | |
| Fri 11/06 | SmartNIC I (Custom ASIC) |
Google's Falcon | Second progress report on the project due. |
| Wed 11/11 | SmartNICs II (FPGA) |
Microsoft's AccelNet | Alibaba's Triton, Microsoft's Catapult |
| Fri 11/13 | SmartNICs III (DPUs / SoCs) |
DDS | |
| Wed 11/18 | SmartNICs IV (DPUs vs FPGA vs RMT) |
Alibaba's Albatross | |
| Part 4: 5G/ 6G/ Cellular | |||
| Fri 11/20 | O-RAN |
O-RAN | |
| ~~Thanksgiving break~~ | |||
| Part 5: Course Conclusion | |||
| Wed 12/02 | Student presentations |
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| Fri 12/04 | Wrapping up |
No readings, only lecture | Final project report due. |
| Wed 12/09 | Final project presentation |
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Last updated: 2026-08-03 12:00:58 -0500 [validate xhtml]