ACM SIGCOMM'97

Tutorials, September 14-15, 1997

Registration information

Group Communication in Wide Area Networks

Mostafa Ammar, Georgia Tech., and Don Towsley, UMass.

There is tremendous demand for network support for group applications, those that involve three or more participating users. Examples of such applications include teleconferencing, distributed games, software distribution, distributed database updates, and command/control systems. This tutorial will focus on the issues that arise when developing appropriate network services for these applications and the recent trends in their resolution. The most important of these issues relate to the scalability of proposed services and their suitability for applications including users with widely differing capabilities. We will begin by reviewing the Internet's IP multicast and the MBone. and then focus on the problem of multicast routing and review different approaches that have been proposed. We will then focus on the following services required to support group communications: o provision of quality of service (QoS) including call admission and resource reservation
o reliable data transfer
o flow control for heterogeneous users within a group
Last we will focus specifically on multicast in ATM and how it is likely to be interfaced to IP multicast.

Mostafa H. Ammar received his Ph.D. Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, 1985. His S.M.(1980), S.B.(1978) degrees were acquired in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. Dr. Ammar is currently an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. He has been with Georgia Tech since 1985. For the years 1980-82 he worked at Bell-Northern Research (BNR), in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, first as a Member of Technical Staff and then as Manager of Data Network Planning. Dr. Ammar's research interests are in the areas of computer network architectures and protocols, multipoint communication, distributed computing systems, and performance evaluation. He is the co-author of the textbook "Fundamentals of Telecommunication Networks," published by John Wiley and Sons. Dr. Ammar is the holder of a 1990-1991 Lilly Teaching Fellowship and received the 1993 Outstanding Faculty Research Award from the College of Computing. He is a member of the editorial board of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and Computer Networks and ISDN Systems Journal. He is also the co-guest editor of a recent issue (April 1997) of IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication on "Network Support for Multipoint Communication". He is the Technical Program Co-Chair for the 1997 IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols. Dr. Ammar is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM and a member of the Association of Professional Engineers of the Province of Ontario, Canada.

Don Towsley received the B.A. degree in physics and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of Texas in 1971 and 1975 respectively. From 1976 to 1985 he was a member of the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts. He has held visiting positions at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY (1982-1983), Laboratoire MASI, Paris, France (1989-1990), and INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, France (1996). His research interests include networks and multimedia systems. He currently serves on the Editorial board of Performance Evaluation and has previously served on numerous editorial boards including those of the IEEE Transactions on Communications and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. He was a Program Co-chair of the joint ACM SIGMETRICS and PERFORMANCE '92 conference. He is a member of ACM, ORSA and the IFIP Working Groups 6.3 and 7.3. He has received two best paper awards from the ACM SIGMETRICS annual conferences and has been elected Fellow of both the ACM and IEEE.

Electronic Commerce

Chase Bailey, cisco

With the growth of the Internet and Intranet as an infrastructure around the globe, a new business model using electronic transactions or exchange is enabled. Businesses see this new paradigm and growth as enabling to their relationships with customers, suppliers and partners. Electronic transaction technologies (especially protocols like Secure Electronic Transactions, SET) are now enabling businesses to enter into new industries and new markets where they have been unable to go before. Into global, regional markets where channels have not been available. Electronic Commerce is often referred to in the sense of the business transaction (such as retail transaction), or "buying over the Internet". In fact, the use of electronic commerce is even more fundamental. Companies will be able to provide secure means of marketing products and services electronically. Services provided directly to the buyer/customer rather than through layers of middle-men/companies, allows businesses to better know their customers and understand their needs. Businesses also see the benefit to enable them to automate, speed-up and simplify their business processes. These services enable a more direct way of providing the customer with exactly what is needed, thereby reducing errors and costs to the customer/end-user. In addition, users have the ability to interactively modify their use of the services offered them and gather information to meet their specific, individual requirements. Enabling technologies for the Electronic/Internet commerce marketplace are still under development and deployment. Security and services to support transactions over the Internet are paramount to the success of Electronic Commerce. The tutorial will briefly overview the marketplace for Electronic Commerce focusing on the vertical and horizontal markets, and the players. The major portion of the tutorial will focus on the technical issues and a study of security, crytopgraphy, authen- tication, the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) protocol, certificates, certificate authorities and other technical requirements for Electronic/Internet Commerce.

Chase is Director of New Markets and New Technologies and a Principal Technologist in Business Development at Cisco Systems in San Jose. His responsibilities at Cisco include the assessment and analysis of emerging technologies and markets and how they relate and can be incorporated into Cisco's current business plans and strategies. Prior to Cisco, Chase was founder and chief technical officer of Efficient Networks, an ATM technology supplier of chips and adapters. He has worked in the networking industry for over 20 years in companies such as Silicon Graphics, Interphase Corporation, Forward Technology and others. His technical background is as a software developer of operating systems, networking stacks and drivers and recently as a developer of ASICs specific to networking solutions. He also teachs Internetworking and Network Security at Santa Clara University in the graduate program, School of Engineering.

Internetworked 3D Computer Graphics: Beyond Bottlenecks and Roadblocks

Don Brutzman, Mike Macedonia, Theresa-Marie Rhyne and Steve McCanne

Although networking and computer graphics are considered to be distinct disciplines, they have begun to converge. For example, both graphics and networking must be considered together when using 3D for collaborative exploration, information visualization and large-scale virtual environments (LSVEs). This tutorial presents an introduction to merged computer graphics and networking concepts for using and developing interactive Internet- based graphics applications. We plan to show examples of the capabilities and tradeoffs involved when interactive 3D graphics are combined with the World Wide Web and live information streams across the Internet. Finally we discuss how the SIGCOMM community is affected by computer graphics applications in the evolutionary process of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards, the ACM Special Interest Group on Communications (SIGCOMM), the VRML Consortium and other standards-related organizations.

Don Brutzman is an Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Academic Group at the Naval Postgraduate School. His research interests include underwater robotics, real-time 3D computer graphics, artificial intelligence and high-performance networking. He is very active in the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) Community and was Chair of the VRML 97 Symposium. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Groups on Graphics (SIGGRAPH) and Communications (SIGCOMM), the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) Consortium.

Mike Macedonia received his Ph.D. in computer science from the Naval Postgraduate School. Currently, he is Vice President in charge of developing virtual environments for commerce, government, and education at the non-profit Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics (CRCG) His research interests include multicast data networks, real-time computer graphics and large-scale virtual environments. He also contributed to the United States' National Academy of Sciences report entitled "Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges" detailing the networking and communications research needed to continue the development of virtual reality systems.

Theresa-Marie Rhyne is currently a Lead Scientific Visualization Researcher and is responsible for the Research and Development activities at the United States Environmental Protection Agency's Scientific Visualization Center. She is employed by Lockheed Martin Technical Services. Her research interests include visualization toolkit development, collaborative visualization in a networked environment, and the integration of geographic information systems with scientific visualization. She is also a practicing fine artist and art educator in computer graphics. She was the ACM SIGGRAPH 96 Panels Chair and currently serves as a Director at Large on the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee. (Example Graphics at Web site: (http://www.epa.gov/gisvis))

Steve McCanne received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1996. From 1988 to 1996, he was on the staff at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he co-developed the network and application architecture and software that underlies the Internet Multicast Backbone or "MBone'' tools. In 1996, he joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is currently an Assistant Professor. His research interests include multimedia networking, multicast communication protocols, signal compression, remote collaboration technologies, and network simulation architectures. He is a member of the IEEE, the ACM, the AAAS, and the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Traffic Management: Concepts, Issues, and Challenges

S. Keshav, Cornell University

Traffic management is the set of policies and mechanisms used to control traffic in a network. It spans multiple time scales, from scheduling and policing at the fastest time scale, to capacity planning at the slowest. It also spans multiple "traffic classes", an abstraction that refers to a common set of application requirements and corresponding network services. This tutorial will cover traffic management in large networks, including examples from the Internet, the telephone network, and ATM networks. Topics include:

o An economic basis for traffic management
o Traffic models
o Traffic classes
o Time scales of management and control
o Less than one RTT time scale policing, shaping, and scheduling
o Multiple RTT time scale feedback flow control and renegotiation
o Session time scale routing, signaling, and admission control
o Day time scale peak load pricing
o Weeks to months time scale capacity planning
o Open issues and challenges

S. Keshav is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Formerly a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Dr. Keshav received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1991. He is the author of numerous technical papers, two of which were selected by ACM Sigcomm as being among the most influential papers in computer networking in the past twenty-five years. His book, "An Engineering Approach to Computer Networking" was published by Addison-Wesley in their Professional Computing Series in May 1997.