20th LCN Technical Program
The Sheraton Metrodome Hotel
Minneapolis, Minnesota U.S.A.
October 15-18, 1995
Last update: 27 July 1995
Conference schedule:
Sunday, 10/15, 1-5 p.m. (Half-day tutorials)
Monday, 10/16, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. (Full-day
tutorials)
Tuesday, 10/17 (Keynote address and
conference)
Wednesday, 10/18 (Conference)
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Keynote Address
Computer Network Protocols: Myths and Mysteries
Radia Perlman, Novell
The world of computer network protocols is a confusing place. The first
step towards understanding it all is to realize that a lot of it doesn't
make any sense. People invent a concept, give it a name, but even if
initially well defined, as the concept evolves it blurs into other
concepts. Good examples are bridges vs. routers vs. switches vs. hubs,
interdomain vs. intradomain routing protocols, LANs vs. WANs, and broadcast
vs. multicast.
Another mystery is why there so many protocols. What exactly is a protocol?
Is it an entire suite? An entire layer? Every separate mechanism within a
layer? What's the difference between a new version of a protocol and a new
protocol?
Radia will also attempt to dispell some myths (like that IPX is a LAN
protocol), and give some controversial viewpoints around issues the world
takes for granted (like that the world needs bandwidth reservation).
Radia Perlman is the author of the book Interconnections: Bridges and
Routers and a coauthor of the recently published Network Security:
Private Communication in a Public World. She spent many years working
in the network architecture group at Digital Equipment Corporation on the
design of routing protocols, including the spanning tree algorithm used by
bridges. Radia is currently at Novell, Inc, designing routing, distributed
database replication, and security protocols. Her PhD thesis at MIT was on
the design of a practical routing protocol invulnerable to a denial of
service attack.
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Tutorials
Presenter: Herb Hecht, SoHaR
The principal dependability concerns are reliability, maintainability, and
availability. The primary causes of failure are physical (breakage or
change of state) and logical (miswiring, software fault, operator error).
Conventional measures for these will be presented, and their strengths and
weaknesses in the current distributed computing environment will be
discussed, followed by selection of the best alternatives. Physical causes
can be controlled by improved materials properties and redundancy; logical
causes can be controlled by improved statement of requirements, exception
handling, and functional redundancy; both benefit from improved test
techniques. Examples for each of these measures will be presented, and a
simplified cost-benefit evaluation technique for dependability improvements
will be introduced. The tutorial will conclude with a plan for a
Dependability Program for a computer communications system.
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Presenter: Khosrow Sohraby, University of Missouri-Kansas City
The objective of this tutorial is to provide a thorough coverage of the
basic principles of ATM networks. The tutorial covers the fundamental
issues in both architecture and performance of ATM networks. Synchronous
Optical Network (SONET) and Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) will be
covered with examples. The ATM architecture will be discussed where
physical layer, ATM Layer and ATM Adaptation Layer (AAL) will be carefully
examined. Congestion and flow control, traffic engineering and correlated
source modeling will be covered. A simple probabilistic calculus for
estimating the end-to-end cell delay variation (jitter) will be given. The
tutorial concludes with an overview of ATM testbeds and open issues.
Contents:
- Basic Introduction to ATM
- Summary of Existing Transport Mechanisms
- Objectives of ATM
- ATM Cell Format and Transmission
- Example of ATM Operation
- ATM Networking Basics
- Physical, ATM and AAL Layers
- Different Transmission Rates Over SONET
- ATM Layers and Virtual Path and Virtual Circuit Concepts
- ATM Adaptation Layer Protocol Model, AAL1, AAL3/4 and AAL5 and Examples
- ATM Higher Layers
- User, Control and Management Planes
- Control Plane Addressing and Routing
- Control Plane Signaling Functions
- Management Plane
- ATM Traffic Management and Congestion Control
- Traffic Contract and Quality-of-Service Parameters
- Traffic Descriptors
- Traffic Shaping and Policing
- Connection Admission Control
- Rate Based Flow Control Schemes
- Congestion Control, Avoidance and Recovery
- ATM Traffic Engineering
- Review of Markov Chains
- Traffic Modeling of Correlated Sources
- Markovian ON-OFF Source Models for VBR Traffic
- Cell Loss Estimation in ATM Networks
- Statistical Multiplexing Gain in ATM Networks
- End-to-End Cell-Delay-Variation (Jitter) Calculations in ATM Networks
Khosrow Sohraby received B.Eng and M.Eng degrees from the McGill
University, Montreal, Canada in 1979 and 1981, respectively, and Ph.D
degree in 1985 from the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, all in
Electrical Engineering. He has worked as a research associate at the
L'institute national de la recherche scientific - INRS Telecommunications,
Montreal, Canada, a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories,
Holmdel, NJ, and a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research
Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. Since 1994, he has been a professor of
Computer Science Telecommunications Program at the University of
Missouri-Kansas City.
Dr. Sohraby is an active member of the IEEE Communications Society and has
served as the guest editor of a number of special issues of the Journal
of Selected Areas in Communications and Communications Magazine.
He is a member of the editorial board of COMPUTER NETWORKS and ISDN
SYSTEMS, Wireless Networks Journal, International Journal of
Wireless Networks, and Network Magazine.
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Presenter: Charlie Kaufman, Iris Associates
The international, intercorporate, information superhighway is a scary
place. There are spies anxious to steal our secrets. There are tabloid
reporters eager for a juicy scoop. There are criminals hoping to steal
goods and services. There are maladjusted creatures that attempt to fill
the emptiness of their lives by destroying our data and sabotaging the
integrity of the network itself.
But there is hope, through the magic of cryptography. Cryptography,
together with a properly designed protocol, allows us to protect
information from disclosure and modification.
Contents:
- Important properties of various types of cryptography, including public
key, secret key, and message digest algorithms, without going into the
mechanics of specific algorithms.
- Classic pitfalls in authentication handshakes such as reflection
attacks, bucket brigade attacks, off-line password guessing, and message
splicing.
- The key distribution problem in a large network, handled through Key
Distribution Centers when secret-key-based cryptography is used, and
Certification Authorities when public-keys are used. We contrast the KDC
and CA approaches according to criteria such as security, performance, and
ease of configuration.
- Secure electronic mail. We discuss issues such as how encryption and
digital signatures are affected by mail exploders. We describe and contrast
PEM, PGP, and X.400.
- Deployed systems. We describe and contrast many deployed
systems including Kerberos, Lotus Notes, NetWare, DCE, NetSP (IBM), SPX
(Digital), LAN Manager, Windows NT, and Clipper.
Charlie Kaufman is a coauthor of the recently published book Network
Security: Private Communication in a Public World. He spent many years
working in the network architecture group at Digital Equipment Corporation
on the design of security protocols. He is currently at Iris, Inc., a
subsidiary of Lotus Corp, where he is security architect for Lotus Notes.
He is the chair of the IETF working group designing security for the
World-Wide Web.
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Presenter: Radia Perlman, Novell
Much confusion exists around IPX. Many people think it is a LAN-only
protocol. In fact it is a simple, straightforward, connectionless network
layer protocol. There are valid complaints that can be made about bandwidth
use, but these issues are not IPX issues, but rather issues with protocols
that have been associated with IPX. For instance, the inefficient routing
protocol RIP is being replaced by NLSP, a link state protocol. And the
Service Advertisement Protocol (SAP), which is wonderful for
autoconfigurability but is a bandwidth hog that can be tamed or replaced by
directory services. This tutorial will discuss IPX and related protocols
RIP, SAP, and NLSP. It will compare IPX with IP and other network layer
protocols. It will talk about future directions for IPX for improved
scalability. It will also discuss some of the other protocols in the
NetWare protocol suite, including directory services and authentication.
Radia Perlman is the author of the book Interconnections: Bridges and
Routers and a coauthor of the recently published Network Security:
Private Communication in a Public World. She spent many years working
in the network architecture group at Digital Equipment Corporation on the
design of routing protocols, including the spanning tree algorithm used by
bridges. Radia is currently at Novell, Inc, designing routing, distributed
database replication, and security protocols. Her PhD thesis at MIT was on
the design of a practical routing protocol invulnerable to a denial of
service attack.
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Presenter: Yoram Ofek, IBM
The objective of this tutorial is to examine and study the current trends
in high-speed LAN technologies -- from rings and buses to MULTIMEDIA
SWITCH-BASED ATM LANS. First, we examine the reasons why existing LANs are
based on a single shared communication resource and a simple topology like
a ring or a bus. Then we review what are the problems and various
solutions of LANs with concurrent access and spatial bandwidth reuse. The
next step towards switch-based LANs or arbitrary topology LANs (e.g., ATM
LANs) introduces major design challenges. We will examine the possible
routing and flow control solutions for integrating bursty traffic with
periodic traffic in switch-based LANs for multimedia and
parallel/distributed processing applications.
Contents:
- Part 1: Background
- High performance LAN and WAN constraints: physical layout, bandwidth
and propagation delay
- Application support for real-time and bursty data processing (i.e.,
multimedia applications)
- Extended LAN bridges
- Part 2: LAN Evolution
- From Ethernet and Token-ring to FDDI and DQDB
- From single shared medium to spatial bandwidth reuse
- From rings and buses to switch-based LANs with arbitrary topology:
- Why switch-based LAN?
- Problems with switch-based LANs
- Part 3: Periodic Traffic Routing and Flow Control
- Cell multiplexing in ATM with label swapping (VCI and VPI)
- Synchronous traffic management on rings and buses
- Rate control at the network's boundaries (e.g., leaky bucket)
- Scheduling and traffic shaping with local timing (e.g., deadline
scheduling, priority queues)
- Pseudo-isochronous cell switching for ATM
- Part 4: Bursty Traffic Routing and Flow Control
- LAN emulation in ATM
- Rate-based flow control in ATM LANs
- Credit-based flow control in ATM LANs
- "Hot potato" and deflection routing
- Deflection with convergence routing
- Part 5: Advances in Technology and Protocols
- Complexity and cost of ATM packet switches
- Broadcast and multicast
- Transport protocol, error recovery and FIFO delivery to the application
- Fairness in switch-based LANs
- Part 6: Summary and Conclusions
- Integration periodic and bursty traffic in ATM LANs
- Open issues
Yoram Ofek received his B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in 1979, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D.
degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois-Urbana in
1985 and 1987, respectively.
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Panel Sessions
Panel Chair: Bill Seifert, Agile Networks
Many are confident about ATM's promise. Others are skeptical about ATM's 53
byte cell, control structure, buffer sizes and distribution, guarantees of
bandwidth and latency, the lack of a well defined and thought out approach
for connecting to legacy LANs and many other issues.
Whether a believer or skeptic, limited bandwidth, latencies, large spanning
trees and ATM applications may demand some migration to ATM. How to migrate
to this fast evolving technology with rapidly dropping cost performance is
not clear.
The Panelists will focus on the Whys and Hows of migrating to ATM with a
totally unbiased and absolutely rational cognizance of the many
questionable issues.
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Panel Chair: Herb Hecht, SoHaR
This panel will discuss the current state of LAN dependability, with
emphasis on the increasing amount of problems that are not due to
conventional reliability concerns, such as opens and shorts, corroded
connections, or incompatible protocols. There will also be a presentation
on the evolving changes in reliability concepts, such as the replacement
of military standards by commercial ones (arrived at with DoD
participation). These will affect both the definition of dependability
requirements and the dependability evaluation of development and
implementation practices. A major contribution to the required
improvements will come from better development tools, ranging from
requirements analyzers to schematic and logic generators and to
configuration management
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Panel Chair: James Hughes, Network Systems Corp.
As applications routinely exceed 1 Gigabit/sec and move toward even higher
speeds, the characteristics of the application, the interconnect and the
network must work harmoniously with each other. The goal is to achieve
these high performance levels, end-to-end. The panelists in this session
will talk about the challenges they have experienced in achieving these
high performance levels and the technical approaches which have the
attributes needed for the next generation of high performance systems.
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Panel Chair: Ken Thurber, Architecture Technology
Just bridging or routing used to be a hot and difficult topic. Then came
the high bandwidth backplane switches. Next were FDDI, faster switches,
Fiber Channel, Fast Ethernet, ATM and, others. Choosing from this ever
increasing potpourri of faster changing technologies can be an
intellectually taxing and controversial task. How many different devices,
systems and protocols can the mere mortals in the networking organizations
manage?
The panelists will expound on their clear, simple and, straightforward
approaches for configuring your network? A tape recorder may be useful for
keeping up with this lively discussion.
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Paper and Focused Interest Sessions
Session Chair: Milind Buddhikot, Washington University
- "Moving Towards ATM: LAN/WAN Evolution and Experimentation at the
University of Oregon," Randolph G. Foldvik and David Meyer, U S WEST Communications
& University of Oregon.
- "Deploying ATM in a Data Network: An Analysis of SVC Requirements,"
Russell J. Clark, Ronald R. Hutchins, & Scott Walker Register, Georgia
Institute of Technology.
- "Priority-Based High-Speed Switch Scheduling for ATM Networks," Chao-Ju
Hou, Ching-Chih Han, and Wun-Chun Chau, University of Wisconsin.
- "A Fault-Tolerant Architecture for ATM Networks," Chi-Chun Lo and
Chen-Yu Chiou, National Chiao-Tung University.
Track B: Network Management
Session Chair: Joe Bumblis, MCC
- "Congestion Control of Multi-cast Connections in ATM Networks," Tetsuya
Yokotani, et al., Mitsubishi Electric Corporation.
- "The Software Structure of the Call Control for ATM Systems," Eunyoung
Sohn and Taesoo Chung, ETRI, Korea.
- "An Efficient Terminal-Pair Reliability Algorithm for Network
Management," Maria C. Yuang and Yu G. Chen, National Chiao Tung University,
Taiwan.
- "Design of a VLSI Fuzzy Processor for ATM Traffic Sources Management,"
Ing. Daniela Panno, et al., Universita di Catania.
Track C: WAN/MAN/LAN
Session Chair: Kanti Prasad, University of Massachusetts at Lowell
- "Performance Modeling and Analysis of a Robust WDM Network," Anura P.
Jayasumana, et. al., Colorado State University.
- "Experimental Evaluation of Real-Time Support on the Mercuri Wide Area
ATM Testbed," Allalaghatta Pavan, et.al., Honeywell, U S WEST, and AT&T
Bell Laboratories.
- "Optimal Multihop Routing: An Iterative Approach to TWDM Embedding,"
David H.C. Du, Allalaghatta Pavan et.al., Network Systems, Honeywell, and
The University of Minnesota.
- "Internetworking MANs to ATM for Broadband Services Support,"
K.R.Kidambi, et al., University of South Florida.
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Session Chair: Shu-Ping Chang, IBM
- "Real-time ATM traffic measurements and analysis," N. Bjorkman et. al., Telia Research AB
- "The cell loss process in ATM networks and its impact on Quality of Service," N. Bjorkman, et. al., Telia Research AB
- "Data Transfer Bottlenecks Over SPARC-Based Computer Networks," Emilie T. Saulnier and Betty J. Bortscheller, GE Research and Development
- "Guaranteeing Application-to-Application Deadlines in Distributed Real-Time Systems," Wei Zhao, et al., Texas A&M University
Track B: Multimedia
Session Chair: Bhumip Khasnabish, Bell-Northern Research
- "Integrated Multimedia in Manufacturing Networks using ATM," Max R. Pokam, Jean-Francois Guillaud, and Gerard Michel, Institut IMAG
- "A performance Study of Adaptive Video Coding Algorithms for High Speed Networks," Sanjeev Gupta and Carey L. Williamson, University of Saskatchewan
- "DMTS: A Distributed Multimedia Teleworking System," J.G.Liu, J.C.Liu, Y.G.Chen, and Maria C. Yuang, National Chiao Tung, University, Taiwan
- "Quality of Service Management and Control of Multimedia Applications: a Scenario and Two Simple Strategies," R. Bolla, F. Davoli, and M. Marchese, DIST-University of Genoa
Track C: High-Speed Networks I
Session Chair: Bernhard Albert, Colorado State University
- "Performance Evaluation of Switched Fibre Channel I/O System using FCP for SCSI," Steven Emerson, Ancor Communications
- "A New Protocol for Optical High-Speed Packet-Switched Networks," M. Guizani and S. Ghanta, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals (KFUPM)
- "Real-Time Communication in the Demand-Priority LAN The Effects on Normal Priority Traffic," Peter Martini and Joerg Ottensmeyer, University of Paderborn, Germany
- "Evaluation of a Data Communications Model for Switched Fibre Channel," Steven Emerson, Ancor Communications
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Session Chair: Khaled Amer, IBM
- "Approximation of FDDI Minimum Reconfiguration Time," William S. Hiles and David T. Marlow, Naval Surface Warfare Center
- "Host and Adapter Buffer Management in the Credit Net ATM Host Interface," Peter Steenkiste et. al., Carnegie Mellon University
- "Performance of FDDI LANs using Numerical Methods," Bernhard Albert and Anura P. Jayasumana, Colorado State University
- "Solving Capture in Switched Two-Node Ethernets by Changing Only One Node," Wayne Hayes and Mart L. Molle, University Of Toronto & University Of California
Track B: ATM II
Session Chair: Patrick Gonia, Honeywell
- "Statistical Properties of MPEG Video Traffic and their Impact on Traffic Modeling in ATM Systems," Oliver Rose, University of Wurzburg
- "The Use of Learning Algorithms in ATM NetworksCall Admission Control Problem: A Methodology," Athanasios V. Vasilakos, Hellenic Air Force Academy
- "Optimal Multicast Routing for ATM Networks," Y.G.Chen, M.T.Yen, and Maria C. Yuang, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
- "Media Transport Service for Video Retrieval Application on ATM Networks," Ranga S. Ramanujan, et al., Architectual Technology Corporation
Track C: Network Design Issues
Session Chair: Ron Vetter, North Dakota State University
- "An Architecture for Internetworking Integrated Services LANs," Vinod Mirchandani & David Everitt University of Melbourne
- "A New Class of High Speed LAN Access Protocols Based on the Principle of Timed Packet Release," David W. Pritty, Duncan N. Smeed, and Norman L. Lawrie, University of Strathclyde
- "Throughput behavior of the n-ary Stack Algorithm in Mobil Networks with Capture," Chatschik C. Bisdikian, IBM
- "A Definition of the XTP Service and its Formal Specification", J.W. Atwood and Y. Zhang, Concordia University
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- "Performance Analysis of an ATM Local Computer Network," Nader
Mirfakhraei, Washington University.
- "Experience with Distributed Objects in A Portable and Multithreaded
Library for A LAN/WAN Gateway Application," Mehrad Yasrebi, Bellcore.
- "Multimedia Traffic Characterization from the High Definition Distance
Learning ATM Trial," Jack Pugaczewski, Will Walling, Melissa Wiklund, U S
WEST.
- "Performance Comparison of Design Alternatives for Source Policing
Devices in ATM Systems," M. Ritter, S. Kornprobst, F. Hubner, University of
Wurzburg, Germany.
- "Performance Analysis of a High-speed Dynamically Reconfigurable LAN,"
Saad AlKasabi and Salim Hariri, Syracuse University.
- "An Implementation of 100Mbps TAXI Subscriber Board," Chan Kim and Jung
Hoon Paik, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute.
- "Configuring a Large LAN for TCP/IP, AppleTalk, and IPX," Shaun H.
Cooper and Patricia J. Teller, New Mexico State University.
- "A Distributed Cycle Reset Protocol for the High-speed LAN/MAN,"
Sun-Moo Kang, et al., LETR.
- "Request Based Channel Access Protocol on Folded Bus Topology," Anura
P. Jayasumana, et al., Colorado State University.
- "Aspects of Video and Audio Signals Transmission in a FDDI Network,"
Claudia Jacy Barenco, et al., Federal University of Santa Cartarina.
- "Performance of XTP and TCP/IP in a Satellite Environment," U. Hofmann,
et al., University of Salzburg.
- "Quasi-Static Load Balancing in Local Area Networks," U. Hofmann, et
al., University of Salzburg.
- "A Synchronization Service Framework for XTP," Manuel Esteve, Carlos
Palau, and Juan C. Guerri, Technical University of Valencia.
- "Design and Analysis of All-Optic ATM Switching Elements for High Speed
Networks," M. Guizani, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals.
- "A Simulation Architecture for a Pico-Cellular Hybrid Network," Hassan
Zeino and Michel Misson, I.U.T. Department Informatique.
- "Multi-segment Bandwidth Reservation Protocol for DQDB Subnetwork,"
Yukuo Hayashida, et al., Saga University, Japan.
- "Alternative Configurations for Local Network Design," Amr Elsaadany,
Mukesh Singhal, and Ming T. Liu, Ohio State University.
- "Analysis of Interconnecttion of FDDI-II Networks Through an ATM
Backbone," Anura P. Jayasumana, et al., Colorado State University.
- "Internet Vulnerabilities of One-Time Passcode Mechanisms," Cindy
Cullen, Bellcore.
- "An Expert Fault Manager using an Object Meta-Model," Bruce Barnett,
General Electric Corp. Research Center.
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