Course Objective

Students will acquire basic knowledge of:
• performance aspects of networked systems, consisting of servers,
services, and clients
• performance engineering principles and methods
• quantitative models for predicting and optimizing the performance
of networked systems
• quantitative models for planning capacity of networked systems.
Students will gain experience in modelling, engineering and planning
performance of networked systems, and will learn how to tackle practical
performance problems arising in the ICT industry.

Course Content

Over the past few decades, information and communication technology
(ICT) has become ubiquitous and globally interconnected. As a
consequence, our information and communication systems are expected to
process huge amounts of digital information, which puts a tremendous
burden on our ICT infrastructure. At the same time, our modern society
has become largely dependent on the well-functioning of our ICT systems:
large-scale system failures and perceivable Quality of Service (QoS)
degradation may completely disrupt our daily lives and have huge impact
on our economy. These developments raise the need for understanding the
nature and source of performance problems, and for finding effective
ways to make our networks robust and reliable.

Motivated by this, the course will address performance-related issues
in communication networks. To this end, we study traffic
characterization, performance modeling, traffic management, QoS
provisioning and capacity planning for both wired and wireless/mobile
communication networks (such as WiFi, 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G networks, and
mobile ad-hoc networks). We address questions like:

- How do mobile communication network technologies work, and how can we
model their performance?
- How can we manage and control traffic flows and provision QoS in
global-scale communication networks?
- How can we deal with the omnipresence of the phenomenon of uncertainty
in virtually all aspects of communication networks?
- What techniques are available to model, analyse and optimize
performance?

Teaching Methods

Classroom lectures and two practical homework assignments.

Method of Assessment

The assessment will be based on both homework assignments (each 20%) and
a written exam (60%). It is not possible to retake the homework
assignments.

Entry Requirements

The students should have basic knowledge of computer networks.

Literature

Textbook, supplemented with a reader on Stochastic Performance
Modelling.

High Performance Browser Networking, Ilya Grigorik, O-Reilly, 2013.

Target Audience

mBA, mCS, mPDCS, mEct