CSSE 593
Internet Applications & Services

Spring 2009

[Announcement] [Course Information] [Course Objectives] [Lectures] [Prerequisites] [Readings] [Syllabus & Schedule] [Projects] [Useful Links]

Professor: Dr. Yingwu Zhu

Announcement

Course Information

Course Objectives

    In the last few years we have seen an amazing new wave of Internet applications. The emergence of the new Internet applications & services is changing our lives and transforming our world in many ways. Not only using the Internet to browse the web and exchange emails, people are but also using the Internet to search, share and disseminate diginal informations, to talk (VoIP), to shop (Amazon), to exchange video clips (YouTube), to watch TV and movies (VoD), to play games, and to have a "second life" in virtual worlds. The Internet has become a huge online community that is deeply interconnected and clustered at multiple dimensions.

This course studies the principles and practice of a wide range of Internet applications and services. The topics include but are not limited to: Content Delivery Networks (CDN) & Web Performance, Web Searching, Content Distribution, Peer-to-Peer Networks, Video over Internet and Performance Services.

Lectures and mini-presentations

    Each lecture consists of two parts. In the first part, the instructor will talk about the state-of-the-art in that week's topic. The lectures will be based on recent research papers and other references. In the second part of the class, we will have an open-forum discussion following the lecture: Each student need to ask questions and the instructor or the other students will answer the questions. We may also have one or two small student presentations about specific applications that are related to that week's topic. Students are encouraged to volunteer in the small presentations.

The students MUST participate in class. Participation includes but is not limited to asking questions, raising a point, presenting an argument, offering an alternative point of view. One class miss will result in one scale down in your final grade (You have at most 3 class misses if you can get A in final grade).

Prerequisites

    Some (recent and solid) knowledge of  computer networking is required. This should certainly NOT be the first networking course you are taking. However, you do not need to be a  "networking student" to take this course.

This course also requires knowledges of Operating Systems and Data Structures as well as background in C/C++ programming.

Readings

    The course will NOT have a textbook. Instead, we will study a number of research and survey papers (listed in the syllabus section). (How to read a paper?) Reading is the first step into the Internet Applications & Services.

Each class involves reading one or two papers. You are REQUIRED to read the papers before you attend the class. (Papers marked as optional are not required.) In addition, you may also be asked to write a short paper review for some papers. Each review cannot exceed one page in 10-point fonts. Each review should include the following sections:

  1. Problem (< 5 sentences): What is the problem the paper addresses? Why is it worth solving? Why are existing solutions not good enough?

  2. Meat (< 5 sentences): What are the technical nuggets that make this paper cool? In another word, what are the challenges and how do the authors address them?

  3. Evaluation (< 3 sentences): How do the authors demonstrate that they have solved the problem? Do you have doubts on their claims?

  4. Improvements (< 3 sentences): What would you have done differently? For instance, can you think of better approaches to solve the problem? Or if you are not convinced by the evaluation, what different methods would you use? Or if you are not excited about the problem, explain why.

Each paper review is due in class. Handwritten reviews will not be accepted. Copy-and-Paste in the paper reviews is considered plagiarism, which will make you to fail the course. Each review will be graded on a scale of 0 to 3 based upon the following criteria: In addition to research papers, we recommend two textbooks for background materials:

Syllabus, schedule, and links to references (subject to change)

Projects

    Students will work on individual or group projects. There are two linux servers that you can use to do your projects. The first one is "cs1.seattleu.edu". To access it from outside campus, you do NOT need to use VPN. The second one is "css2.seattleu.edu". To access it from outside campus, you MUST use VPN. The username and password are same as your SU email account name and password!

Project Milestones:

Grading

Useful Links

http://www.cs.utah.edu/dept/old/texinfo/gdb/gdb_toc.html.

http://www.unix-ag.uni-siegen.de/docs/unix/unix.html

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