Friday, June 08, 2007

Best papers for a theory/networking class?

When I recently visiting Princeton, the esteemed Jennifer Rexford mentioned a great idea for a graduate class. The theme would be "Theory papers every networking person ought to read." Naturally, I have some biased thoughts on the matter. But I would like to collect suggestions from others here. This would be a class that I'd love to teach!

For my own purposes, I'm also interested in the other direction -- what are the networking papers every theory person ought to read?

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

People who work on security should really understand the basics of cryptography. Unfortunately, I don't know of any short surveys to recommend, and even most textbooks are not that great.

Anonymous said...

security \neq crypto

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...

security \neq crypto


security \neq networking is a more valid point

Anonymous said...

Anon #1 here.

Of course security \neq networking, but many networking papers deal with security.

And of course security \neq crypto, but I think there would be fewer crappy security papers out there if people writing these papers had a basic understanding of cryptography, both as a tool (e.g., when to use encryption and when to use signatures) and a methodology (e.g., the idea of definitions and security proofs, when applicable).

Michael Mitzenmacher said...

I'd like to short-circuit this security/crypto debate (though I do agree that many networking papers involve security, and by extension, some cryptography).

I'd like to get back to the original question -- what are the key papers theory people think networking people should read? I can make my own list -- indeed, I'll plan on posting one -- but I'd like to hear the insight of others.

Anonymous said...

i am not able to suggest a few "best papers", but the references
for my course from fall 2004, contain many good papers in the "algorithms for networking" area (imho, of course).

aravind

Michael Mitzenmacher said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Michael Mitzenmacher said...
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Michael Mitzenmacher said...

(Apologies for the multiple comments -- the web links are coming out just fine in the preview, but not in the actual comment for some reason???)

Aravind,

I agree, that's an excellent list of papers, with some in both directions (theory papers for networking people and vice versa).

Other interesting course pages include

1> Bruce Hajek's course on distributed algorithms
2) Ashish Goel's course on network algorithms,
3) Jon Kleinbergs's course on information networks,
4) my own
Algorithms at the End of the Wire.

In case that doesn't come out again, here are the URLs directly as text:

1>http://courses.ece.uiuc.edu/ece559/spring06BH
Bruce Hajek's course on distributed algorithms
2) http://www.stanford.edu/~ashishg/network-algorithms
Ashish Goel's course on network algorithms,
3) http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Courses/cs685/2006sp/
Jon Kleinbergs's course on information networks,
4) http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/CS222/class.html
Algorithms at the End of the Wire.