Informazioni sul corso

Communication networks have evolved significantly over the last years. In particular, Software-Defined Networks introduced a more flexible, logically centralized and consolidated control of the network, unlike traditional networks where the control plane operates in a decentralized manner. Innovations are especially fast in datacenter networks, which are typically under a single administrative domain and where emerging technologies are easier to deploy. Besides software-defined control and network virtualization technologies (such as VxLANs), datacenter networks typically use different congestion control and routing protocols. Often, these protocols or even the optical network topology itself (in case of reconfigurable datacenters) are optimized to serve specific datacenter traffic workloads, such as batch processing jobs, distributed machine learning and training. In this course, you will first learn about the Internet control plane in general (including e.g. IP, MPLS networks). We will then discuss software-defined networks, programmable dataplanes (P4), and network virtualization, before we focus on datacenter networks, which is our main topic in this course. In addition to the conceptual parts, this course also provides a significant hands-on experience in simulating datacenter networks and testing new protocol designs. Depending on the time, we will discuss some concepts of wireless and cellular network control.