| Week 1 Fundamentals |
Introduction. Syllabus. Overview and motivation. The telephone network vs. the Internet. Time-division, frequency-division & statistical multiplexing, virtual circuits, packetization, store & forward, packet- vs. circuit-switching, bandwidth-delay product. | P&D: Ch. 1.1 - 1.2 | Week 2 Layering and Reliable Delivery |
Internetworking basics: definitions, Internet address allocation. Layering. Modularity, decentralization. Hourglass principle. OSI model. Simple reliability: Stop-and-Wait, timeouts, sequence numbers, throughput. Sliding Window algorithm: cumulative acks. | P&D: Ch. 4.1.3, P&D: Ch. 2.5 | Week 3 Transport Level and Transport Protocols |
Pipelined reliability. Static sliding window: algorithm and performance. Using sequence numbers. EWMA RTT estimation. UDP: packet format and packet processing, encapsulation, ports. UDP checksums, UDP vs. TCP. TCP: objectives, segments, header format, 3-way handshake. | P&D: Ch. 5.1 - 5.2 |
| Week 4 TCP Internals |
TCP state diagram. TCP flow control and interface with the application. Example of flow control operation. Using TCP & UDP: Sockets in BSD UNIX, socket system calls. | P&D: Ch. 5.2, handouts | |
| Week 5 TCP Internals (continued) |
Better RTT estimation and setting timeout values (Jacobson, Karn & Partridge). Intro to TCP congestion control. Slow start vs. steady-state AIMD. Fast retransmit and fast recovery. Flow control vs. congestion control. | P&D: Ch. 6.3 | |
| Week 6 Forwarding and Routing |
Forwarding, routing and contention resolution. Virtual circuits, connection-oriented vs. datagram forwarding, source routing. Distance-vector, routing loops, breaking loops. Split horizon and poison-reverse. Link-state routing and Dijkstra's algorithm. | P&D: Ch. 3.1, P&D: Ch. 4.2 | |
| Week 7 Switching & Internetworking |
Introduction to switch fabrics. Input and output buffering. Analysis of throughput through a crossbar. Output buffer design issues, building a knockout switch. IP: objectives, packet format, encapsulation, fragmentation and reassembly. | P&D: 3.4.1 - 3.4.3 P&D: Ch. 4.1 - 4.2 |
Week 8 Other Useful Network Protocols |
ARP, RARP, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Intro to Mobile IP. Mobile IP concepts, example of Mobile IP in practice, Midterm review. | P&D: 4.2 + Handouts. | Week 9 Midterm + More Internetworking |
Midterm. Answers to questions on the midterm. Efficient use of Internet addresses: subnetting and supernetting. Use of subnet masks. CIDR for classless addressing. | P&D: Ch. 4.3 | Week 10 Wide-Area Networking + Multicast |
Issues of scale in wide-area network routing. Brief survey of BGP. Issues in IPv6: protocol changes, incremental deployment. Motivation and applications for multicast. Intro to IP Multicast. Multicast addressing, the MBone, tunneling between multicast-enabled routers. | P&D: Ch. 4.3 P&D: Ch. 4.4 + handouts |
Week 11 More on Multicast |
Multicast session management and delivery strategies: spanning tree, reliable flooding, reverse-path forwarding. IGMP, PIM-SM. ACK implosion, hierarchical multicast, use of forward error correction (parity packets). | P&D: Ch. 4.4 (partial coverage) |
Week 12 Thanksgiving Week |
Motivation for and performance analysis of Ethernet's CSMA/CD protocol. exponential backoff. | P&D: 2.6 (partial coverage) |
Week 13 MAC Layer Protocols |
FDDI. Configuration, fault-tolerance and frame formats. Token-based access, synchronous vs. asynchronous traffic, bidding for token rotation time. Wireless (802.11). Collision avoidance with MACA(W). RTS and CTS handshake. Hidden and exposed node problems. | P&D: Ch. 2.7 |
Week 14 Real-time Traffic + Integrated Services |
Intro to compression. Huffman codes and example (not in book). Compressing and encoding of images and video streams. Techniques used in JPEG and MPEG standards. Real-time applications. Quality of service guarantees, rate- and delay-adaptivity, elasticity, admission control. RSVP. |
P & D: Chapter 9.1. - 9.2 P & D: Chapter 6.5 |
| Week 15 Review |
Last day of class. Course overview in conjunction with application level protocols. DNS: mapping hostnames to IP addresses. Steps in executing an ftp transfer. HTTP: Persistent connections and caching. | ||
| Final Exam |