Computer Laboratory – Course material 2009–10: Digital Communication II

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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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