Teaching

My teaching contributions fall into two categories. On the one hand, I have contributions to several tutorials that have been presented during academic conferences. On the other hand, I am involved in the organization of University courses.

Tutorials

  • Integrating a Multipath Transport Protocol in my Application: Challenges to get Benefits

    Quentin De Coninck

    Presented on 24. Nov. 2022 at WOS'22: workshop on streaming

    With the increasing adoption of Multipath TCP (and more recently Multipath QUIC), applications can now simultaneously use several network paths. There are two major use cases for using multiple paths: bandwidth aggregation and fast network resiliency. However, “Multipath-specific” algorithms (path management, packet scheduling,…) often optimise specific applications and misusing them might lead to counter-intuitive results. In this talk, we will consider two simple applications having different requirements. Considering Multipath TCP and Multipath QUIC, we will see how these protocols behave in different network scenarios. We will conclude by a discussion about the streaming case.

    Slides (PDF)

    Presentation recording

  • Multipath Transport Protocols

    Quentin De Coninck

    Presented on 25. Sep. 2020 at ACM MobiCom 2020 ( tutorial page )

    The tutorial aims at summarizing the lessons learned during the last ten years with multipath transport to enable SIGCOMM attendees to correctly apply those emerging protocols. More precisely, our tutorial’s objectives are the following:

    • Understand the benefits and challenges of using multiple paths in the transport layer
    • Understand the design assumptions and principles of Multipath TCP
    • Understand how the security and flexibility features of QUIC have enabled a cleaner design for Multipath QUIC
    • Discover the impact of the algorithms that implementations use to manage the different paths: path manager, packet scheduler and the required adaptations to the congestion control scheme
    At the end of the tutorial, the attendees will be able to determine when and how multipath transport can be applied to their use cases. They will also have a more in-depth understanding of the impact of the packet scheduling, congestion control and path management mechanisms on the performance of these protocols.

    Slides for the Multipath TCP lecture

    Slides for the Multipath QUIC lecture

    Hands-on materials (vagrant box)

    Tutorial recording

  • Multipath Transport Protocols

    Olivier Bonaventure, Quentin De Coninck

    Presented on 10. Aug. 2020 at ACM SIGCOMM 2020

    The tutorial aims at summarizing the lessons learned during the last ten years with multipath transport to enable SIGCOMM attendees to correctly apply those emerging protocols. More precisely, our tutorial’s objectives are the following:

    • Understand the benefits and challenges of using multiple paths in the transport layer
    • Understand the design assumptions and principles of Multipath TCP
    • Understand how the security and flexibility features of QUIC have enabled a cleaner design for Multipath QUIC
    • Discover the impact of the algorithms that implementations use to manage the different paths: path manager, packet scheduler and the required adaptations to the congestion control scheme
    At the end of the tutorial, the attendees will be able to determine when and how multipath transport can be applied to their use cases. They will also have a more in-depth understanding of the impact of the packet scheduling, congestion control and path management mechanisms on the performance of these protocols.

    Slides for Multipath TCP part (pdf)

    Slides for Multipath TCP part (pptx)

    Slides for Multipath QUIC part

    Hands-on materials (vagrant box)

    Tutorial recording (starts at 38 min)

  • QUIC

    Maxime Piraux, Quentin De Coninck, François Michel

    Presented on 25. Jun. 2019 at Compas'2019

    Internet transport protocols usually evolve slowly. Any significant evolution to TCP, the dominant transport protocol, takes years of efforts to be widely deployed. There are several factors that explain this slow evolution. QUIC, initially proposed by Google, addresses those issues and brings back innovation in the transport layer. The results obtained by Google with QUIC combined with its security features have convinced the IETF to standardise a new protocol starting from Google’s initial design. While the protocol specification is currently being finalised, QUIC brings a number of challenges and opportunities.
    In this tutorial, we first give an introduction to the QUIC protocol by detailing the context that lead to its inception, its principles and core mechanisms. Then we discuss the practical challenges arising from QUIC's design, ranging from its specification complexity to the system performance aspects involved in making efficient user-space transport implementations. Finally, we survey existing works from the research community to highlight the new opportunities of transport layer innovation brought by QUIC such as transport-layer Forward Erasure Correction and Multipath support.

    Slides

University Courses

I have been involved in the following courses.

  • LINFO1341: Réseaux informatiques (given in French), as a Teaching Assistant (2016, 2017, 2018, 2021)

  • LEPL1503: Projet 3 (given in French), as a Teaching Assistant (2020)

  • LSINF1252: Systèmes informatiques (given in French), as a Teaching Assistant (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019)

  • LINFO1225: Conception orientée objet et gestion de données (given in French), as a Teaching Assistant (2016)

  • LINGI2172: Databases, as a Teaching Assistant (2016)

  • LINFO1121: Algorithmique et structures de données (given in French), as a Teaching Assistant (2015)

  • LINGI2241: Architecture and performance of computer systems, as a Teaching Assistant (2015)