General References

  The TCP/IP Protocol Stack

  Organizations and People

  Ethernet

  PPP

  ATM

  WAN Packet Size Distributions

  Network simulation

  High-Speed Networks, Routers and Routing

  TCP/IP Implementations

  DHCP

  Draft Standards

  Security

  Mobile IP

  Real-time Internet statistics

  Sockets resources

  Call signaling

Andrew Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, Third Edition

William Stallings, Data and Computer Communications, Sixth Edition. The author's Web page for this book offers overheads and links to course Web pages

Roger L. Freeman, Telecommunication System Engineering, Third Edition, is a "Handbuch", i.e., a comprehensive reference on all aspects of communications, including transmission systems, analog and digital switching, interswitch signaling (SS7), and circuit-switched and packet-switched networks

The ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM) has a very useful archive of papers presented at the SIGCOMM conferences

The best-written introduction to TCP/IP is Internetworking with TCP/IP, Volume 1: Principles, Protocols and Architecture, Third Edition, by Professor Douglas E. Comer.

The second and third volumes in Professor Comer's series are strongly recommended for those who intend to do TCP/IP programming

• Internetworking with TCP/IP: Vol.II, Design, Implementation, and Internals, Second Edition, covers the implementation of TCP/IP, including source code for most of the TCP/IP protocols in a working operating system called XINU (for which source code is also available)
• Internetworking with TCP/IP: Vol.III, Client-Server Programming and Applications, covers the details of the sockets interface. Versions exist for
  • AT&T TLI,
  • Berkeley UNIX, and
  • Winsock.

The "TCP/IP Illustrated" series, by W. Richard Stevens, is a favorite of professional programmers, hackers, and those who learn best by working through concrete examples

• TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The Protocols uses tcpdump, telnet and other tools to explore the major implementations of the TCP/IP protocols in great detail
• TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 2: The Implementation walks through the source code of the BSD-Lite implementation of the TCP/IP protocols
• TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 3: TCP for Transactions, HTTP, NNTP and the UNIX Domain Protocols
• Pocket Guide to IP, UDP and TCP headers, and to the TCP state diagram, from Volumes 1 and 2

An Engineering Approach to Computer Networking, by S. Keshav, takes a design-oriented approach to networking

• The online version of the REAL network simulator may be useful for for getting started on some of the EE 8350 projects

On-line sockets programming guides

• A good introduction to BSD socket programming
• A crash course in UNIX socket programming

The Internet Society

• The Internet Engineering Task Force
• The Internet Research Task Force

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority manages the root of the Domain Name System, which means that IANA makes decisions about the location of root nameservers and evaluates proposed changes to the set of top level domains

• Jon Postel
• The Generic Top-Level Domain Memorandum of Understanding
• The Internet Council of Registrars
• The InterNIC will register a network address and a domain name -- for a fee

Vinton Cerf, one of the two co-inventors of IP

The IEEE 802.3 working group Web page

Charles Spurgeon's Ethernet page is a valuable resource for anyone who needs to design or analyze an 802.3 LAN

By far the best book on the Gigabit Ethernet physical layer is Gigabit Ethernet Networking, by Drs. David G. Cunningham and William G. Lane (Macmillan Technical Publishing, ISBN 1-57870-062-0)

Working papers of the 10 Gigabit Ethernet working group, in a tarred and gzipped archive (beware: this is over 8 MB!): 10GEthernet_tar.gz

The Web page of the Gigabit Ethernet Alliance provides many technical details of this emerging standard

The Bellcore archive of Ethernet packet traces provides a valuable database for use in simulating local area networks. The trace files (after being uncompressed) are in two-column ASCII format. The first column gives the time in seconds since the start of the trace. The second column gives the Ethernet data in bytes (not including Ethernet header and frame check bytes) in the packet received at the given time. Larger and newer sets of traces are available at the Internet Traffic Archive and at the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR).

• A paper by W. E. Leland and D. V. Wilson (Proc. IEEE INFOCOM '91, April 1991, pp. 1360-1366) describes the measurement techniques used in making the traces. Click here for a figure that was omitted from the electronic version.
• Local Area Network Traffic Characteristics, with Implications for Broadband Network Congestion Management, H. J. Fowler and W. E. Leland, IEEE JSAC, 9(7), September 1991, pp. 1139-1149, gives a valuable description of a trace-driven simulation of LAN interconnection
• An analysis of these traces was published by Leland et al. in the SIGCOMM '93 proceedings
• The above papers require Adobe Acrobat Reader software, which is available for free from the Adobe Web site

A biography of Dr. Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com

How to build a wiring closet for your home Ethernet LAN and connect it to ISDN

PPP Design and Debugging, by James Carlson, is an excellent technical reference on PPP

• James Carlson's PPP Page

pppd source code (for UNIX and its clones)

IP over PPP over SONET/SDH

• Cisco's application note gives a semi-technical overview of their implementation
• Technical literature pertaining to the Cisco 12000 switching router

Microsoft's developer drafts on its proprietary PPP extensions

The ATM Forum

ATM performance

• The performance of a photonic ATM switch (article)
• The performance of ATM over the NASA ACTS satellite (article)

Tutorial material

• ATM primer and overview of WANs from Silicon Graphics
• The Inside ATM pages are a bit dated, but still useful
• ATM user reference guide from Allied Telesyn

ATM via satellite (Comsat page)

Measured packet size distributions on various backbone links

Greg Minshall's page on packet size distributions

The Internet Traffic Archive

Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis

• CAIDA Network Tools

The SMURPH package emulates the MAC layer of a data communications network

• Here is the version of SMURPH that was used by Professor Mart Molle of the University of California, Riverside, to design a new MAC protocol for Ethernet

The Maryland Routing Simulator

S. Keshav's REAL network simulator

The Multithreaded Routing Toolkit

The LNBL Network Simulator, ns, is a simulation tool developed by the Network Research Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Eclectic collections of simulation references and software

• The network bibliography at Columbia is a searchable database of 38,300 references on performance evaluation, computer networks, and other topics.
• The simulation software archive for the comp.sim newsgroup has a long list of simulation software packages for a broad range of applications. YMMV.

Simulations driven by actual packet traces

• Local Area Network Traffic Characteristics, with Implications for Broadband Network Congestion Management, H. J. Fowler and W. E. Leland, IEEE JSAC, 9(7), September 1991, pp. 1139-1149, gives a valuable description of a trace-driven simulation of LAN interconnection

Simulation of self-similar processes

• FFT-FGN-C generates a fractional Gaussian noise self-similar random process. More precisely, the program's outputs can be interpreted as counts of packet arrivals in a time interval of a specific length. The author describes the program as "fast but approximate". Potential users should be aware that fractional Gaussian noise is only one type of self-similar process.
• The list of publications of the Telesim Project at the University of Calgary contains several downloadable papers on the simulation of self-similar network traffic sources
• "Modelling Self-Similar Network Traffic", by Ross Alexander, Nevil Brownlee and Ilze Ziedins of the University of Auckland, describes a simulation of network traffic using renewal processes with infinite variance arrival times

vBNS, MCI's and NSF's very high speed Backbone Network Service, is available only for research

• vBNS routing table snapshots

The Abilene Project

The Internet Routing Table Looking Glass

Internet Performance Measurement & Analysis

• IPMA Tools
  • ASExplorer is a cool Java tool for mapping autonomous systems
• Internet Routing Table Statistics
• Download IPMA software
• Tools From Other Projects

An Atlas of Cyberspaces includes many links to Internet maps and mapping tools (Thanks to Steve Gibbs for this URL!)

Mapnet is a powerful Java-based Internet mapping tool

The Network Management Server (NMS) is the archive of the newsgroup comp.dcom.net-management

Telnet connection to a working router Hint: Type "show hosts".

The Routing Arbiter

• Routing Arbiter Presentations
• Routing Arbiter Database Tools
• Routing Analysis Software Tools
• RADB Tools
• Routing Arbiter Tools
• Routing Arbiter Toolset
• The Routing Arbiter database

CTSNET BGP routing table entries (searchable)

Merit GateD Consortium Home Page

Router, switch, bridge and hub hardware architecture

• "Fast Switched Backplane for a Gigabit Switched Router", by Nick McKeown (Stanford University), has a good introduction to router architecture as well as a detailed discussion of the architecture of a high-end routing switch
• YAGO Systems: Building superior wire-speed routing and switching solutions...
• Cabletron Products-- The SmartSwitch Router
• "High-performance Interconnect from Standard VLSI Components" describes the hardware architecture of a router

The available TCP/IP source code is mostly BSD 4.4-Lite or linux.

FreeBSD is a collection of ports of BSD 4.4-Lite to the Intel 80x86 architecture. Source code is freely available from the Web site. There is also an online hyperlinked archive of the full source code.

4.4BSD-Lite is the mother lode from which much of the TCP/IP code in use has been mined. The source code is cached locally.

TCP performance tuning for hosts

• Tuning the Solaris TCP/IP stack
• Enabling High Performance Data Transfers on Hosts

The Internet Software Consortium maintains several essential UNIX applications, and makes them freely available, with full source code:

• sendmail is the industry standard for UNIX mail
• BIND, the Berkeley Internet Name Domain, is the primary implementation of DNS (the Domain Name System)
• DHCP, the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, is the industry standard for dynamic assignment of IP addresses
• INN, the InterNet News package

The Linux FTP site

The NCSA httpd implementation is the ancestor of the most popular (and, many sysadmins say, the most stable and secure) Web server on the planet, Apache

Implementing a High Performance Object Oriented TCP/IP Protocol Stack

The Web site of Ralph Droms, the author of the DHCP RFC

Diego Zamboni's DHCP links

• Problems and Solutions of DHCP - Experiences with DHCP implementation and Operation

Multiprotocol label switching (MPLS)

• MPLS architecture
• MPLS framework
• Switching in IP Networks: IP Switching, Tag Switching, and Related Technologies, by Bruce Davie, Paul Doolan, Yakov Rekhter (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, May 1998)

Mobile IP, v.2

The Internet security "establishment"

• The Web site of CERT, the Computer Emergency Response Team, is the place to look for official guidelines on detecting and fixing security problems
• FTP link to the CERT advisories
• Dan Farmer's security links
• Dan's survey of Web vulnerabilities

The secure sockets layer (SSL) for on-line purchases

• The SSL 3.0 specification
• Netscape's SSL 3.0 implementation assistance
• Traces of two actual SSL connections, showing all of the cryptographic computations and other details

Cryptography and security links on my personal hotlist

Prominent security holes

• The ping of death
• The hijacking/SYN flood/IP spoofing attack
  • Tsutomu Shimomura's post on the attack on his machine
  • Steve Bellovin's post explaining the attack

Windows 95 and Windows NT have many security loopholes, some of which are hard to fix without disabling desirable functionality. In no particular order, here are some possibly useful sites:

• Asmodeus (renamed the WebTrends Security Scanner) is a security scanning program for Windows NT
• Versalink's page on Windows NT and Windows 95 security weaknesses
• Bill Stout's home page, with security links
  • His draft summary of known Windows NT exploits

The BugTraq archive (searchable)

Hacker sites

• Phrack is a good place to read about the rationale behind attack methods, not just grab some exploit code
• The rootshell Web site has a month-by-month list of UNIX exploits, plus a search engine
• Exploit World has a chronological list of exploits (including breakins of routers and terminal servers), including links to full descriptions and exploit code.
• Hrvoje Crvelin's Security Bugware site
• Attack Cross-Reference

IP spoofing/splicing references

Charles Perkins, the inventor of Mobile IP v4, has authored, or contributed to, several excellent sources of information:

• A book, Mobile IP: Design Principles and Practices, published in November 1997
• A Mobile IP tutorial located on the Web site of the IEEE Computer Society

Mobile IP, v.2

The UCLA Internet Weather Report

Prof. Cantrell's Sockets directory

Signaling System 7 (SS7)

• Microlegend's SS7 tutorial
• Network Magazine's SS7 tutorial
• Illuminet's SS7 tutorial
• Natural Microsystems' paper SS7 and Intelligent Networking Applications