Seminar - Future Internet Protocols, Consolidation and Decentralization (2025)

The Internet was designed to be decentralized. However, over the last decades, the Internet has witnessed the consolidation and concentration of content, services, applications, and infrastructure. These effects impact the society and its development.

Distribution, federation, and decentralization are approaches applied throughout the Internet to cope with increasing control over Internet infrastructure, content, applications, and services by a small set of organizations. These approaches are applied across different layers of the Internet.

In this seminar, we explore recent efforts in architectural designs, deployments, and their underlying concepts toward distribution, federation, and decentralization. In particular, we will investigate the claims and benefits these proposals bring to existing Internet architectures as well as key deployment challenges and issues of these solutions for the future. Examples of systems, applications, services, and algorithms include Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS), BlueSky, Mastodon, Bitcoin, and Ethereum.

Registering for this seminar follows the usual process of the Matching System of the Department of Computer Science

Moodle page

To stay up to date with the latest course information during the semester, please refer to the course's Moodle page.

Time and location

For remote participation via BigBlueButton (BBB), see the link on the Moodle page.

Dates and times: see Moodle

First session (preliminary): 23 April 2025, 15:00

Course requirements (recommended)

An undergraduate-level course on computer networks and networking protocols should already prepare the participants. Familiarity with networking tools used for performance evaluation and network security may be beneficial, though not required.

Learning outcomes (study goals)

The topics covered in this seminar revolve around Internet protocols and architectures, rising considerations on Internet consolidation, and efforts to decentralize the Internet. The papers will give students the technical knowledge and understanding of the latest advancements in emerging networking and algorithmic solutions. The participants will also learn how to critically read and discuss research papers. This will be achieved by reviewing papers individually and actively participating in group discussions during the seminar presentations. Students will also have the opportunity to advance their soft skills through presentations. Presentations will involve learning to not only stay within time limits but also to appreciate the Q/A session at the end of the presentation.

Specifically, after the seminar, the student should be able to:

• Understand the need for new Internet architectures and protocols and tradeoffs between consolidation and decentralization.
• Explain the technical details of the discussed proposals and architectures.
• Discuss design principles and the performance of the presented solutions.
• Understand the importance of (independent) peer reviews.
• Present research concisely and within the allotted time (conference-style settings). 

Teaching and Learning Method

> (Transfer of Skills) Workload for Students

Workload

Given a list of papers, each participant will be required to:

• Write 6 reviews (5 for pure review, 1 for review and presenting) (about 6 -12 hours workload, 40% of final grade)
• Present one paper during the semester (about 4-10 hours workload, 40% of final grade)
• Attend and participate in sessions (about 2-3 hours/session x 3 sessions, 20% of final grade)

Workflow

1. Each participant could submit their preference (2-3 preference to topics)
2. The lecturer will assign papers to them for review (5 papers) and present (1 paper)
3. The participants finish and submit reviews before the DDLs(sessions). There will be a paper presentation schedule; please find the corresponding sessions for your papers.
4. The presenter introduces the paper (15-20mins), and the corresponding reviewers participate in the discussion (10-15 mins)

(The exact numbers may vary slightly due to the registered students.)

Participants are encouraged to refer to Future Internet Protocols and Decentralized Internet Architectures for previous iterations of the seminar.

Each participant covers a topic area by presenting one relevant paper during the seminar. To ensure everybody has read the papers, the participants must hand in a review of the presented papers via HOTCRP following the provided review template. The answers to the review forms should be brief and concise. Refer to the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) that did reviews for accepted papers public for the 2012 and 2013 programs.

Paper allocations will be done on a best-effort basis, based on preferences (favorite five papers) solicited over email during the semester. A paper will be randomly assigned if no preference is sent. The first seminar course slot will be used to set the agenda for the seminar.

Further Reading

• S. Keshav. "How to read a paper"
• William G. Griswold, "How to Read an Engineering Research Paper"
• Graham Cormode. 2009. "How NOT to review a paper: the tools and techniques of the adversarial reviewer."
• J Smith. "The Task of the Referee"

Contact

• David Guzman <david.guzman[at]tum.de>
• Justus Fries <fries[at]in.tum.de>