Must read computer networking research papers

A lot of Quora users ask this question: What are most influential research papers that contributed to the development and improvements in Internet and networking technologies? Based on my academic study (material provided by Prof. Minlan Yu and Prof. Wyatt Lloyd), work experience and research on computer networks, I created a list that would help my readers to read/know/understand the most significant research contributions. I will keep this list updated based on recent conferences. 

Instead of providing a direct link, I prefer to provide the citations as I consider it the correct way to provide reference to other's works. You can search for the paper using the title in either Google or Google Scholar.

Before I start to mention networking related papers, I would like to introduce my audience to a must read paper that will help you to understand and absorb the contents of research paper effectively. Trust me, you want to read this paper if you want to improve your reading skills.

How to read a paper

1.  Keshav, S. "How to read a paper." ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 37.3 (2007): 83-84.

Let's start with the inception of Internet. DARPA researchers had put together the design of the first network called ARPANET. I suggest you to read the next paper to understand the design decisions for developing a generic network to be used across multiple communities.

2. Clark, David. "The design philosophy of the DARPA Internet protocols." ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 18.4 (1988): 106-114.

History of Internet

After reading 2. you would understand the fundamental thoughts that were put together to design Internet. With this knowledge, you can design your own Internet without fearing about the complex details of it. A very important detail that you must consider while designing any networking technology is whether you are aiming an end-end feature or hop-hop. A good start is the next paper which talks about End-to-End argument in detail.

3. Saltzer, Jerome H., David P. Reed, and David D. Clark. "End-to-end arguments in system design." ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS) 2.4 (1984): 277-288.

These papers give you a great insight into the design principles for any large scale network. Now lets focus on the concrete design requirements of a reliable packet delivery network. There are various things that one would try to address while designing a reliable packet communication like packet identification, acknowledgements, redelivery of failed packets. The authors of the next paper addressed a lot more in their paper. This paper was published later in SIGCOMM in 2005.

4. V. Cerf and R. Kahn, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication," in IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol. 22, no. 5, pp. 637-648, May 1974


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Next, we will look at IP routing protocols that allow packets to be routed from source to destination via routers. There are mainly two types of routing protocol used within an AS (autonomous system) - Distance Vector and Link State routing. To understand these protocols, I recommend you to read the CISCO white papers.

5. CISCO IP routing white paper

Note that understanding Routing is a major achievement. IGP routing (Interior Gateway Protocol) is implemented within an AS. On the other hand, EGP routing (Exterior Gateway Protocol) is implemented across different ASes. An AS is a single administrative unit that controls a set of IP prefixes and has their independent routing policy. BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is the most commonly used protocol for routing across ASes. Note that managing different ASes is the most difficult task at hand. The next paper underlines the issues associated with BGP routing and proposes a solution to achieve convergence within permissible time.

IGP vs BGP

6. Gao, Lixin, and Jennifer Rexford. "Stable internet routing without global coordination." ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review. Vol. 28. No. 1. ACM, 2000.

Due to the autonomous nature of BGP, ASes can act maliciously to advertise routing paths which don't exist. Additionally, there are other security concerns associated with BGP due to local policy selection which can't be monitored. I recommend you to read the next paper which describes the security loopholes in BGP and solutions to fix them.

7. Goldberg, Sharon. "Why is it taking so long to secure internet routing?." Communications of the ACM 57.10 (2014): 56-63.

Another important perspective towards routing is to look at the safety and liveness property of routing algorithms. Most routing algorithms favor responsiveness over consistency which has negative effects like routing loops. The next paper is the first one to introduce "consensus routing" which deals with the side effects of current routing protocols.

8. John, John P., et al. "Consensus routing: The Internet as a distributed system." Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. 2008.

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Now, I am going to talk about the my favorite topic - TCP - which is the most crucial component for end-end reliable communication, flow control and congestion control mechanism. The idea of TCP took birth with the research paper #4 where Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn discussed a single  internetworking protocol that handles both TCP and IP features. The most complex of all TCP features is the congestion control mechanism due to no or limited knowledge from the network at the end hosts. I would definitely recommend the next paper for a moderate understanding of congestion control.

9. Jacobson, Van. "Congestion avoidance and control." ACM SIGCOMM computer communication review. Vol. 18. No. 4. ACM, 1988.

TCP congestion window in Tahoe and Reno 

The next set of papers are only intended for readers who want to research on better/improvised TCP versions. These are advanced research papers targeted to improve TCP performance. I have personally read them and used this knowledge to flaunt in my technical interviews.

XCP (eXplicit Control Protocol)

10. Katabi, Dina, Mark Handley, and Charlie Rohrs. "Congestion control for high bandwidth-delay product networks." ACM SIGCOMM computer communication review 32.4 (2002): 89-102.

DCTCP 

11. Alizadeh, Mohammad, et al. "Data center tcp (dctcp)." ACM SIGCOMM computer communication review. Vol. 40. No. 4. ACM, 2010.

MPTCP

12. Wischik, Damon, et al. "Design, Implementation and Evaluation of Congestion Control for Multipath TCP." NSDI. Vol. 11. 2011. 

TCP has been long dominating the systems that require reliable communication until recently when Google introduced QUIC - a UDP based reliable and secure transport protocol. It has improved congestion control mechanisms and uses forward error correction for better performance - much higher than TCP. I highly recommend you to read QUIC design.

13. QUIC overview

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Next, I would like to talk about the accessories of computer networking which act as an add-on to greatly improve the network performance. Load balancer is one of them which sits between the router and the organization's network to balance the incoming traffic. With the increase in traffic (billions of requests/sec), providers host the service on multiple end points and use load balancers to distribute traffic to end points evenly for best performance. Maglev, introduced by Google, is a software load balancer that replaces expensive inflexible hardware load balancers with the help of distributed software.

14. Eisenbud, Daniel E., et al. "Maglev: A fast and reliable software network load balancer." 13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 16). USENIX Association, 2016.

Network virtualization has become increasingly common in data center networks to provide centralized control over the network services and underlying network resources with the help of network functions. Besides providing routing and switching capabilities, it also provides L4-L7 services for access control and load balancing. The decoupling of control and forwarding plane (SDN idea) has greatly aided in the advancement of network virtualization. The next paper on Open vSwitch provides comprehensive details about one of the major breakthrough in this area.

15. Pfaff, Ben, et al. "The Design and Implementation of Open vSwitch." NSDI. 2015.

I think the above material is a good way to start thinking like the designer of Internet-like network. You can put yourself in a situation where you are asked to design an alternate Internet model from scratch. Networking has been the biggest field of research from the time of its inception and it will always be due to the its inherent challenges.