The tutorial talks first about the network basics so the participant can get a good overview of networking concepts and understand how networking is done in his particular situation. The tutorial describes where different technologies fit into a network architecture by grasping how data flows in networks using the OSI model. Several examples are given to understand why each protocol is needed, how it is used, and what other protocols it relies upon.
In a second part, the tutorial covers advanced concepts and the latest infrastructural trends in networking. This includes packets and circuits switching, optical switching, DWDM, MPLS and GMPLS, IPv6, dynamic provisioning and 10 Gigabit Ethernet technologies (WAN-PHY and LAN-PHY). The deployment and the implementation of the advanced research backbone between CERN (Geneva) and Caltech (Los-Angeles) illustrates this part.
The last part focuses on Ultra-speed data transport and in particular on TCP performance. Although TCP has demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt to vastly different networks, recent theoretical and experimental results have shown that TCP becomes inefficient when the bandwidth and the latency increase. The tutorial reviews the basis of TCP and explains why TCP is not suited to Gbps network. It introduces ongoing projects which are tackling the issue of poor TCP performance over very high speed long distance networks. In particular, it describes and compares the performance of FAST TCP, GridDT, HSTCP, scalable TCP and UDT.