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Digital Communication II

Lecturer: Professor J.A. Crowcroft

No. of lectures and examples classes: 20 + 4

Prerequisite course: Digital Communication I

This course is a prerequisite for Security and Advanced Systems Topics.

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.

• The Telephone Net. It has been around 100 years, and there are important lessons in how it survived and evolved.

• The Internet. It is about 25 years old, and looking decidedly shaky. A quick review of where it is at.

• Asynchronous Transfer Mode networks. A bold attempt to mix Telephone and Internet.

• Modular functionality for communications. Some systems design paradigms, often orthogonal to layers.

• Naming and addressing. Reviewing Who is where?

• A list of common protocols in use today. To see if we can spot design patterns?

• Mapping onto common implementation approaches.

• Routing. How many ways can we work out how to get from A to B? [2 lectures]

• Error control. What do we do when things go wrong? Retransmit, or pre-transmit?

• Flow control. Stemming the flood, at source, sink, or in between?

• Shared media networks. Ethernet and Radio networks: some special problems for media access and so forth. [2 lectures]

• Switched networks. What does a switch do and how? [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. [2 lectures]

• The big picture for managing traffic. Economics, policy and a little MPLS. [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

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Next: Digital Signal Processing Up: Michaelmas Term 2009: Part Previous: Denotational Semantics   Contents