Schedule

The schedule is subject to change over the course of the semester. All deadlines are at 11:59pm (CT) by default.

Date	Topic	Readings & Action Required
Aug 26 (Tue)	Class 1 Course overview, paper reading and critiquing	Required How to read a paper (Keshav, CCR 2007) (no review) Optional A brief history of the Internet (Leiner et al., 1997)
Aug 28 (Thu)	Class 2 Networking review and challenges	Required Browse recent HotNets, SIGCOMM, or NSDI programs, and skim through papers that intrigue you Optional Why the Internet only just works (Handley, BT Technology Journal, 2006)
Sep 2 (Tue)	Class 3 Networking workshop	Required Join the CloudLab project `cs538` Install Mahimahi and Mininet on a small Ubuntu VM Optional Mahimahi (Netravali et al., USENIX ATC 2015) Mininet (Lantz et al., HotNets 2010)
Sep 4 (Thu)	Class 4 IP architecture	Required DARPA Design Philosophy (Clark, SIGCOMM 1988) Optional A protocol for packet network intercommunication (Cerf et al., IEEE Trans. on Comm., 1974)
Sep 6 (Sat)		Deadline Sign up for paper presentation
Sep 9 (Tue)	Class 5 Architectural principles	Required End-to-end argument (Saltzer et al., TOCS, 1984) Optional RFC 1958
Sep 11 (Thu)	Class 6 Classic congestion control	Required Congestion Avoidance and Control (Jacobson, SIGCOMM 1988) Optional Analysis of AIMD (Chiu et al., Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 1989)
Sep 16 (Tue)	Class 7 Queue management	Required CoDel (Nichols et al., ACM Queue, 2012) Optional Bufferbloat (Gettys et al., ACM Queue 2011) Sizing Router Buffers (Appenzeller et al., SIGCOMM 2004)
Sep 18 (Thu)	Class 8 Modern congestion control	Required BBR (Cardwell et al., ACM Queue, 2016) Optional Copa (Arun et al., NSDI 2018) Pantheon (Yan et al., USENIX ATC 2018)
Sep 20 (Sat)		Deadline Submit project proposal
Sep 23 (Tue)	Class 9 Interdomain routing	Required Stable Internet Routing Without Global Coordination (Gao et al., SIGMETRICS 2000) Optional Anatomy of a Large European IXP (Ager et al., SIGCOMM 2012) BGP routing policies in ISP networks (Caesar et al., IEEE Network Magazine, 2005)
Sep 25 (Thu)	Class 10 Secure routing	Required How Secure are Secure Interdomain Routing Protocols? (Goldberg et al., SIGCOMM 2010) Optional Survey of BGP security (Butler et al., Proc. of the IEEE, 2010)
Sep 30 (Tue)	Class 11 Internet measurement	Required Inferring interdomain congestion (Dhamdhere et al., SIGCOMM 2018) Optional E2E Routing Behavior (Paxson, SIGCOMM 1996)
Oct 2 (Thu)	Class 12 Video streaming	Required MPC (Yin et al., SIGCOMM 2015) Optional BBA (Huang et al., SIGCOMM 2014) Pensieve (Mao et al., SIGCOMM 2017) Puffer (Yan et al., NSDI 2020)
Oct 7 (Tue)	Class 13 Guest lecture (TBA)
Oct 9 (Thu)	Class 14 ML in networking (reinforcement learning)	Required Sage (Yen et al., SIGCOMM 2023) Optional Genet (Xia et al., SIGCOMM 2022) Mowgli (Agarwal et al., NSDI 2025)
Oct 14 (Tue)	Class 15 Guest lecture (TBA)
Oct 16 (Thu)	Class 16 Video conferencing (guest lecture by Sadjad Fouladi)	Required Salsify (Fouladi et al., NSDI 2018) Optional GCC (Carlucci et al., MMSys 2016) Tambur (Rudow et al., NSDI 2023)
Oct 21 (Tue)	Class 17 First project check-in	Deadline First project check-in
Oct 23 (Thu)	Class 18 SDN architecture	Required Ethane (Casado et al., SIGCOMM 2007) Optional OpenFlow (McKeown et al., CCR 2008)
Oct 28 (Tue)	Class 19 SDN control	Required Onix (Koponen et al., OSDI 2010) Optional NOX (Gude et al., SIGCOMM CCR 2008) Video: The Future of Networking (Shenker, ONS 2011)
Oct 30 (Thu)	Class 20 SDN use cases	Required SWAN (Hong et al., SIGCOMM 2013) Optional B4 (Jain et al., SIGCOMM 2013) B4 and After (Hong et al., SIGCOMM 2018)
Nov 4 (Tue)	Class 21 ML in networking (explainability)	Required Agua (Patel et al., SIGCOMM 2025) Optional Metis (Meng et al., SIGCOMM 2020) Trustee (Jacobs et al., CCS 2022)
Nov 6 (Thu)	Class 22 Network simulation	Required CausalSim (Alomar et al., NSDI 2023) Optional Why we don't know how to simulate the internet (Paxson et al., Winter Simulation Conference 1997) m3 (Li et al., SIGCOMM 2024)
Nov 11 (Tue)	Class 23 Microservices	Required Autothrottle (Wang et al., NSDI 2024) Optional Leveraging service meshes (Ashok et al., HotNets 2021)
Nov 13 (Thu)	Class 24 Datacenter networks	Required Clos (Al-Fares et al., SIGCOMM 2008) Optional Jupiter Evolving (Poutievski et al., SIGCOMM 2022) Facebook's BGP-based DC (Abhashkumar et al., NSDI 2021)
Nov 18 (Tue)	Class 25 Datacenter transport	Required DCTCP (Alizadeh et al., SIGCOMM 2010) Optional TIMELY (Mittal et al., SIGCOMM 2015) NDP (Handley et al., SIGCOMM 2017)
Nov 20 (Thu)	Class 26 Second project check-in	Deadline Second project check-in
Fall break (Nov 25 & 27)
Dec 2 (Tue)	Class 27 Final presentation (1)
Dec 4 (Thu)	Class 28 Final presentation (2)
Dec 9 (Tue)	Class 29 Final presentation (3)
Dec 18 (Thu)		Deadline Submit final paper