About Course

Outline of the Program Expected Background Learning Objectives Program Materials Tentative Course Outline Course
Schedule About the Presenters Apply

Digital Communication Networks [6.20s]

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Date: July 28-August 1, 2008 | Tuition: $2,500 | Continuing Education Units (CEUs): 3.0

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* Course schedule, registration times, special events

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Outline of the Program

The rapid evolution of wireless and optical fiber communication has created almost limitless opportunities for new digital networks of greatly enhanced capabilities. The networks of today, both wide area and local, have capacities and functionalities many orders of magnitude above those of a few years ago, and these capacities are expected to continue increasing at a rapid rate. The application requirements for networks are changing as rapidly as the technology. Networks must provide integrated service for mobile services, for high-resolution images and graphics, video, voice, and for conventional data. These evolving networks appear to have almost nothing in common with the data networks of the last 20 years, but in fact, many of the underlying principles are the same. Program 6.20s is designed both to provide a fundamental understanding of these common principles and to provide insights into new principles required for present day and future networks.

The primary focus of the program is on communication sub-networks rather than the computers, peripherals, and users accessing a given network. In terms of layered architectures, this means that the focus is on the transport, network, data link, and physical layers. The course explains how these layers operate and interact and how the major functions of each layer are affected by network speed and user requirements.

The course is balanced between descriptive material, illustrating the operation and the limitations of current networks (e.g. the Internet, Ethernet, ATM, 802.11, etc.) and analysis, showing how the performance of networks can be evaluated and improved, and showing how new technologies can be advantageously used. The descriptive material is used to illustrate the underlying concepts, and the analytical material is used to provide a deeper and more precise understanding of the concepts. The course should be attractive to practicing engineers and researchers who want to understand the interface between theory and practice, and would like to apply advanced design and performance evaluation techniques to future digital networks.

Expected Background

The program is designed for people with an engineering background who are interested in the design and use of digital networks. Some knowledge of one or more of the following areas would be helpful to attendees but is neither assumed nor expected: probability, algorithms, elementary queueing theory, digital communication, and optimization.

Learning Objectives

• Describe an overview of communication sub-networks, explaining the general principles governing transport, network, data link, and physical layers.
• Appreciate how these layers operate and interact, and how the major functions of each layer are affected by network speed and user requirements.
• Provide students with the tools to analyze the performance of networks through probabilistic modeling and queueing techniques.
• Provide students with the understanding of the basics of switch and router principles; including switch architectures, scheduling and routing algorithms.
• Investigate the limitations of current networks such as the Internet, Ethernet, ATM, and 802.11, etc.
• Assess how the performance of networks can be evaluated and improved, and how new technologies can be advantageously used.
• Introduce students to new and important developments in the field including WDM-based optical networks technology; storage area networks; wireless ad hoc networks, etc.

Program Materials

Participants will receive class notes.

Tentative course outline

Physical layer communications

Introduction to the elements of digital communications, modulation principles; basics of coding; effects of wireless channels; principles of detection.

Link layer protocols

ARQ (automatic repeat request) protocols; packet framing mechanisms; error detection techniques.

Introduction to queueing theory

Simple queueing results germane to networks; M/M/1 and M/G/1 queues; reservation and polling systems; multi-user reservation systems; priority queueing; and networks of queues.

Higher layer protocols: TCP, IP and ATM

Introduction to the basics of internet protocols including TCP, UDP, IP and their operation; the addition of QoS requirements to the Internet; ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) networks and protocols; internetworking between different networks.

Routing algorithms

Overview of routing in practice; static, quasi-static, and dynamic routing; shortest path algorithms; distance vector and link state routing; stability issues in routing; interconnected and hierarchical networks; spanning tree and source routing for bridged LANS; centralized and distributed algorithms for optimal routing; principles of peer-to-peer routing.

Flow control

Overview of flow control in practice; end-to-end and node-by-node windows; adaptive window flow control; rate control; leaky buckets; guaranteed QoS for rate and delay; buffer management strategies (RED and its variants); rate adjustment; max-min flow control; use of pricing to achieve QoS goals.

Local Area Networks and multiple access

Ethernet and its modern versions; IEEE standards; high speed LANS; all optical LANS; wireless LANS (802.11); Carrier Sense multiple access; the Aloha protocol.

High performance switches and routers

High speed IP routers and ATM switches; router and switch architectures; performance limits of packet switches; switch scheduling algorithms.

Wireless Networks

Wireless network architectures; cellular networks; ad hoc networks; WiFi (802.11) and bluetooth; principles of CDMA; principles of ultrawideband.

Optical Networks and WDM

Overview of Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) and optical network architectures; IP and SONET over WDM; All optical LANs, MANs and WANs; optical network management and algorithms.

Course schedule, registration times, Special events

Class runs 9:00 am - 4:30 pm every day except Friday when it ends
at 3:30 pm.

Registration will be on Monday morning from 7:30 am - 8:30 am.

There will be a dinner for course participants and faculty on Thursday night. Evening activities are included in tuition.

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS

Muriel Médard is a Harold E. and Esther Edgerton Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT and Associate Director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. She was previously Assistant Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and a member of the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. From 1995 to 1998 she was a Staff Member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Optical Communications and the Advanced Networking Groups. Professor Médard received a B.S. degree in EECS and one in Mathematics in 1989, a B.S. degree in Humanities in 1990, a M.S. degree in EE 1991, and a Sc.D. degree in EE in 1995, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. She serves as an Associate Editor for the Optical Communications and Networking Series of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, as an Associate Editor in Communications for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and a Guest Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory / ACM Transactions on Networking joint Special Issue on Information Theory and Networking. She has served as a Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology and as an Associate Editor for the Optical Society of America's Journal of Optical Networking. She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Career award. She was awarded the IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Prize Paper Award 2002 for her paper, "The Effect Upon Channel Capacity in Wireless Communications of Perfect and Imperfect Knowledge of the Channel," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Volume 46 Issue 3, May 2000. She was also awarded the Best Paper Award for G. Weichenberg, V. Chan, M. Médard, "Reliable Architectures for Networks Under Stress", Fourth International Workshop on the Design of Reliable Communication Networks (DRCN 2003), October 2003, Banff, Alberta, Canada. She was co-winner of the 2004 Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award, established in 1982 to honor junior faculty members "for distinction in research, teaching and service to the MIT community." Professor Médard's research interests are in the areas of reliable communications, particularly for optical and wireless networks, and in network coding to networks.

Eytan Modiano is an Associate Professor in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at MIT. From 1993 to 1999 he was with the Communications Division at MIT Lincoln Laboratory where he designed communication protocols for satellite, wireless, and optical networks and was the project leader for MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Next Generation Internet (NGI) project. He was a Naval Research Laboratory Fellow between 1987 and 1992 and a National Research Council Post Doctoral Fellow during 1992-1993 while he was conducting research on security and performance issues in distributed network protocols. Professor Modiano received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Connecticut at Storrs in 1986 and his M.S. and PhD degrees, both in Electrical Engineering, from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, in 1989 and 1992 respectively.

Professor Modiano is an Associate Editor for Communication Networks for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and for The International Journal of Satellite Communications. He had served as Associate Editor for the Computer Networks Journal and the Journal of Optical Switching and networking; and as guest editor for IEEE JSAC special issue on WDM network architectures; the Computer Networks Journal special issue on Broadband Internet Access; the Journal of Communications and Networks special issue on Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks; and for IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology special issue on Optical Networks. He served on the program committee for many major conferences in the networking field including ACM MobiHoc and IEEE Infocom; and was the program co-chair for the 2002 workshop on High-Speed Networks (HSN). He is presently serving as the Technical Program co-chair for Wiopt 2006 and Infocom 2007. His research interests are in the area of communication networks and protocols with emphasis on satellite, wireless, and high speed optical networks.