Digital Communication II

Lecturers: Dr I.M. Leslie and Dr S.A. Crosby
(iml@cl.cam.ac.uk and sac@cl.cam.ac.uk)

No. of lectures: 12

Prerequisite course: Digital Communication I  

Review of basic principles.

Abstraction, layering. Concept of channel. OSI reference model. Standards bodies.

Remote procedure call.

Language features. Binding. Marshalling. Protocol. Semantics.

Unix networking structure.

Concurrency, memory resources, driver and protocol interfaces, IP in Unix.

IP implementation.

The internet checksum, protocol control blocks, fragmentation, UDP and NFS.

Protocol performance.

TCP bandwidth usage and control, congestion, efficiency. Connection states.

Routeing.

Concepts, RIP, Multicast.

Multicast.

CBT, PIM and IPv6.

Quality of service in the Internet.

Guarantees versus best effort. Flow specs. RSVP. Routing versus resource management.

ATM.

Architecture, motivation. Relation to packet switching, circuit switching. Quality of service considerations. Resource management. Performance quantities. VR performance, effective bandwidth. ABR strategies.

Recommended books:

Comer, D. & Stevens, D. (1995). Internetworking with TCP-IP, vol. 1 and 2. Prentice-Hall (3rd ed.).

Halsall, F. (1992). Data Communications, Computer Networks and Open Systems. Addison-Wesley (3rd ed.).

Schwartz, M. (1987). Telecommunication Networks: Protocols, Modeling and Analysis. Addison-Wesley.