Computer Laboratory – Course material 2007–08: Digital Communication II

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Digital Communication II

Lecturer: Dr D.R. McAuley and others

No. of lectures: 20

Prerequisite course: Digital Communication I

This course is a prerequisite for Security (Part II), Advanced Systems Topics (Part II).

Aims

This course aims to provide a detailed understanding of how communications systems operate, through the examples including the Internet amongst others, and presents ways to build such systems. It also covers a selection of topics which relate to recent trends in digital communications systems.

Lectures

Introduction. Course overview. Abstraction, layering. The structure of real networks. [DRM]
The Telephone Net. It has been around 100 years, and there are important lessons in how it survived and evolved. [DRM]
The Internet. It is about 25 years old, and looking decidedly shaky. A quick review of where it is at. [DRM]
Asynchronous Transfer Mode networks. A bold attempt to mix Telephone and Internet. [DRM]
Modular Functionality for Communications. Some Systems Design Paradigms, often orthogonal to Layers [DRM]
Naming and Addressing. Reviewing Who is where? [DRM]
A List of common protocols in use today. To see if we can spot design patterns? and Mapping onto common implementation approaches. [DRM]
Routing. How many ways can we work out how to get from A to B? [DRM, 2 lectures]
Error Control. what do we do when things go wrong? retransmit, or pre-transmit? [DRM]
Flow Control. Stemming the flood, at source, sink, or in between? [DRM]
Shared Media Networks Ethernet and Radio networks - some special problems for Media Access and so forth. [DRM, 2 lectures]
Switched Networks. What does a switch do and how? [DRM, 2 lectures]
Integrated Service Packet Networks for IP APIs to Quality of Service Scheduling and Queue Management Algorithms for packet forwarding What about routing with QoS [DRM, 2 lectures]
The Big Picture for managing traffic Economics, Policy and a little MPLS [DRM, 2 lectures]

Objectives

At the end of the course students should be able to explain the concepts such as Addressing, Buffer Management, Congestion Control, Differential Services, Estimation, Feedback, Gateways, Hierarchy, IP, Jitter, k-ary resilience, Layering, Multiplexing, Networking, OSI, Priority, Queueing, Routing, Switching, Transmission Control, User Plane, Virtualisation, Wireless, eXtensibility, or, ok, Xen:), Yield management, and Zeroconf.

Recommended reading

* Keshav, S. (1997). An engineering approach to computer networking. Addison-Wesley (1st ed.). ISBN 0201634422
Alternatives to Keshav:
Davie, B.S., Peterson, L.L. & Clark, D. (1999). Computer networks: a systems approach. Morgan Kaufmann (2nd ed.). ISBN 1558605142
Stevens, W.R. (1994). TCP/IP illustrated, vol. 1: the protocols. Addison-Wesley (1st ed.). ISBN 0201633469

Next: Digital Signal Processing Up: Michaelmas Term 2007: Part Previous: Denotational Semantics Contents