Networking I
Fall 1997
Individual Presentation I


Oral presentations will be given to the class beginning the week of October 27.
A written paper of 3-5 pages should be handed in at the time of the oral
presentation.  The class will be responsible for the information discussed in
the presentations.  The paper and oral presentation will be valued at a 
combined total of 100 points.

The presentations should be thorough.  The topics should be discussed broadly
and some detail should be employed.  It is not necessary to do a "nuts & bolts"
discussion of topics, but a presentation should provide the listener with a 
somewhat better-than-passing knowledge of the topic.  Even though the listener
does not need a programming-level knowledge, an familiarity with all major
design issues should be conveyed.


Example:

Explain Lucent's Inferno NOS, its design, its functionality, its
implementations, its utility, and its advisability.

I would mention that Inferno is a distributed, architecture-independent, 
network operating system.  I would mention that it was designed with an
objective of reducing the cost and complexity of creating and deploying
software systems.  I would mention that it is very scalable--that it can run on
very large or very small machines, from a mainframe to a networked telephone.
I would also explain the NOS architecture model upon which Inferno was built.
I would compare the abstraction model used in Inferno to that employed by the
java programming language.  The layers of abstraction should be identified and
explained (e.g. the virtual operating system (VOS) and the virtual network 
(VN) systems).  The implications of abstracting these OS-centric features from 
the hardware and how the abstractions impact software developers should be 
discussed.  I would discuss the the Styx protocol, the Dis VM (virtual
machine), the Limbo concurrent programming language, and other features which
directly impact the usefulness of the NOS, both for developers and for users.
Finally, I would discuss environments where Inferno might be advantageously 
deployed, which factors affect the deployment decision process, as well as the
future development of Inferno and how deployment might benefit a given 
environment in the future.