This course aims to present a collection of fundamental design principles and guidelines in modern distributed systems and real- world large-scale networks. In the process, we review a small collection of important research results, not only in the recent literature but also in the literature spanning the past two decades, and see how they reflect fundamental design principles that we have discussed. Our focus is on more recent research literature, in the areas that have been studied extensively: multimedia networking, peer- to-peer networks, as well as multi-hop wireless networks.

The course is divided into a number of episodes (each covered in the time of approximately one lecture depending on progress). We start with an examination of our design objectives, including Quality of Service. We then introduce a number of fundamental design principles that may lead to a high-quality design. Subsequently, we take a leisure walk through more specific areas of research, spanning peer- to-peer networks, wireless mesh networks, secure protocols, so-called "killer" applications, as well as recent advances in network coding. Throughout the course, we revisit the design principles often, and see how they affect the successes (or failures) of research ideas.