Advanced Topics in Computer Communications Networks: Quality of Service (2001)

Prof. Hanoch Levy ( hanoch@cs.tau.ac.il ) 
2nd Semester, 2000/01 - Wednesday 13-16.  
School of Computer Science, 
Tel-Aviv University


This page will be modified during the course.
Time: Wednesday 13-16. Location: Kaplun ..
Please send email immediately to hanoch@cs.tau.ac.il to confirm your participation.

Messages to Students:
DEADLINE for PROJECT SUBMISSION is September 7, 2001.


Copeis of slides (some of the lectures) will be available at the library starting next week (about April 3).

Course syllabus:

Quality of Service (QoS) is one of major issues faced today by the designers of modern comunications networks. Unlike legacy networks which typically dealt with single homoegenous application (e.g., the telephony network) advanced networks attempt at accomodating a large variety of heterogenous applications, such as phone conversations, live video, streaming video, Web, email, FTP, and others. The great differentiation in the properties of these applications places serious challenges to network designers. ATM that was designed with this view in mind has created a whole set of machinery to deal with this problem. In contrust, IP was "minimally designed" and did not address these design issues. Much work is devoted these days to introduce the proper mechanisms into IP. This course will deal with the issues of Quality of Service in communications networks. We will explpore the QoS mechanisms as designed in ATM and examine how these issues are addressed in IP.

Course outline

  1. Introduction
    Review of basic concepts in communications networks.
    Reading material: Tannenbaum Ch. 1 +2.
  2. ATM :
    1. Basic concepts and terminology
    2. Quality of service and classes of service
    3. Policing and shaping (references)
    4. Scheduling: Fair Queueing
    5. Virtual Paths and Virtual Connections
  4. Call Admission Control (CAC)
    (references)
    1. CAC for CBR traffic.
    2. CAC for VBR traffic.
  6. Quality of Service routing.
  7. Internet Communications and QOS in the Internet
  8. Web Performance:
    1. Caching and pre-fetching
    2. Load balancing
    3. Distributed load balancing and contents pushing
  10. Wireless Communications (time permitting)

QOS references

Course requirements:

Class participation, Project (possibly some homework assignments).

Projects (last year topics)

List of projects conducted last year

Links to slides given in class:

Introduction to QoS (part 1).

Introduction to QoS (Part 2).

Call Admission Control: CBR .

Call Admission control: VBR.

Application Level Mechanisms (e.g. Caching).

QoS Routing.



Copies of hand written slides will be available at library starting April 3.

Messages to Students:

DEADLINE for PROJECT SUBMISSION is September 7, 2001.

Last updated 19 Aug 2001

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