6.829 AdminisTrivia (Fall 2001)

Prerequisites

Undergraduate systems or networks course covering basic networking concepts (e.g., 6.033 or equivalent). Consent of instructor if you're an undergraduate.

If your networking background is rusty, you should page material in from one of these excellent books. In particular, I highly recommend the book by Peterson and Davie or the book by Kurose and Ross.

Knowledge of elementary probability (e.g., 6.041, 6.042, or equivalent) and some applied statistics will be helpful.

Enrollment may be limited.

If you feel you know enough about networking, an alternative subject to 6.829 is 6.824. 6.824 is a graduate equivalent of 6.829, but focusses on the engineering of computer systems. If you are a graduate (esp. PhD) student in systems or networking, we recommend that you take both classes during your graduate career at MIT. You must not take them both in the same term, though, since both have heavy-duty projects.

If you're an undergraduate and want practical experience with computer systems, consider 6.097, where you'll learn how to build a stripped-down functioning kernel from scratch.

Course structure

Lectures will discuss assigned readings from the literature. 6.829 will emphasize the practical aspects of computer networks and the Internet, and will be centered around discussions and arguments! Class participation is therefore very important and will count towards your grade.

Grading

The largest contributor to the final grade is a significant course project with a research emphasis. At the end of the term, students will submit a conference-style paper describing the project and its key contributions/findings, and make a 20-minute presentation of their work at the end of the term. This will constitute 40% of your grade. Start early!

In addition, there will be a few problem sets assigned during the term. We expect to use the VINT network simulator, ns-2 for some of the problem set questions. In many cases, we expect ns-2 to be useful for your project too. We strongly encourage you to get familiar with ns-2 as soon as you can, by installing it on your machine and playing with it. While not comprehensive, the available documentation is quite good and adequate to start using it. Any questions about usage are best directed to ns-users@mash.cs.berkeley.edu (there are instructions on the ns-2 Web page on how you can subscribe to this list. Problem sets will constitute 25% of your grade.

We will have two in-class quizzes, currently planned for October 22 2002 and December 10 2002. These count for 30% of your final grade.

Finally, class participation and performance in surprise quizzes (we reserve the right to hand out a few of these during the term) counts for 5% of your grade.

In summary: 

Course project (paper + presentation)  40% 
Problem sets  25% 
Two quizzes 30%
Class participation, enthusiasm and energy-level! 5% 

Remember, this is a graduate class and grades shouldn't be your primary or only motivator! What matters is how much you learn about research in networking and how much it excites you. We hope that this class and the project you work on meet that goal.

Last update: Mon Sep 2 10:11:26 EDT 2002 (6.829-staff@mit.edu)