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

Principles and Techniques for Making Your Network More Available, Reliable, and Maintainable (ARM) and Therefore More Manageable

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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ATM Architecture and Performance

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:

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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Designing Secure Protocols

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:

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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Internetworking with IPX

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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Multimedia Switch-based ATM LANs

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:

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

Migrating to ATM? Why and How

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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How to Make Your LAN More Available, Reliable, and Maintainable and Therefore More Manageable

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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Real Applications Throughput, Megabytes to Gigabytes, Implications for Host Software and LAN Architecture

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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Bridges or Switches or Routers or FDDI or ATM or ?

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

Tuesday Afternoon Paper Sessions

Track A: ATM I

Session Chair: Milind Buddhikot, Washington University


Track B: Network Management

Session Chair: Joe Bumblis, MCC


Track C: WAN/MAN/LAN

Session Chair: Kanti Prasad, University of Massachusetts at Lowell


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Wednesday Morning (Early) Paper Sessions

Track A: Network Performance

Session Chair: Shu-Ping Chang, IBM


Track B: Multimedia

Session Chair: Bhumip Khasnabish, Bell-Northern Research


Track C: High-Speed Networks I

Session Chair: Bernhard Albert, Colorado State University


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Wednesday Morning (Late) Paper Sessions

Track A: High-Speed Networks II

Session Chair: Khaled Amer, IBM


Track B: ATM II

Session Chair: Patrick Gonia, Honeywell


Track C: Network Design Issues

Session Chair: Ron Vetter, North Dakota State University


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Focused Interest Session


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