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Computer Networks, ICS 651

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Instructor: Edo Biagioni, esb@hawaii.edu. See here for office hours.

This class meets MW 1:30-2:45 in POST 127.

Goals

In this course, students will:

Organization

This course has homework assignments, projects, reviews, and exams. The homeworks are not graded, though you may turn them in if you wish to have them checked or if you have questions. Reviews are also not graded, but must be turned in (and be reasonable) to contribute to your grade.

All students are required to join the course mailing list.

Grades are assigned based on your performance on:

Grading will use the (nearly) standard cutoffs of 97% (A+), 93% (A), 90% (A-), 87% (B+), 83% (B), 80% (B-), 77% (C+), 70% (C), 70% (C-), 67% (D+), 63% (D), 60% (D-). Depending on the performance of the class as a whole, I may or may not grade more generously (i.e. grade on a curve). In grading, I will be looking for evidence of understanding of the material and evidence of your ability to do work in the field.

Projects must be turned in on time. You must do well in the projects to do well in this class. Exams may be taken early, if requested at least two weeks before the scheduled time.

Any homeworks will not affect the final grade, so turning them in is optional -- in fact, if you feel able to grade them yourself, that is the suggested procedure. I do recommend that you do them, and I do require that you understand the material contained in the homeworks.

The first and second project must be done individually. The third project may be done individually or in teams of your choosing, up to a maximum of three students. For the first two projects you must use the C language, the third project may be in any language supported by uhunix2. Other languages might be available -- check with the instructor before you begin your project.

The textbook is "Computer Networks -- A Systems Approach", by Peterson and Davie (2nd or 3rd edition). The textbook is available from the UH bookstore and online sellers. The textbook has a home page and a companion page

The course is also based on notes from the instructor that complement the textbook.

Cheating Policy: any cheating will result in a grade of 0 for the assignment or exam the first time it is detected, and a grade of F for the course for any subsequent instance. There is to be no collaboration whatsoever on projects or exams: you may study together, but anything you turn in must be entirely your own intellectual contribution. This applies to the entire group in the case of group projects. The outreach college's instructor's manual states, in part:

Plagiarism includes, but is not limited to, submitting, to satisfy an academic requirement, any document that has been copied in whole or in part from another individual's work without identifying that individual.
The UH law school also has a good definition of plagiarism, including the following:
The submission or presentation of any work, in any form, that is not a student's own, without acknowledgment of the source.
If you have any questions, please contact the instructor.
I do re-use material, so I am always grateful when students can suggest improvements or corrections to any notes. I normally acknowledge authors of major new material, and do not acknowledge people who suggest minor improvements.

Schedule

This schedule is subject to change.

Presentation notes are in HTML. I usually post notes no later than the day before the lecture.

This schedule is loosely based on the same course taught in the Spring 2003 and Spring 2002. If you wish to look ahead, please refer to those courses, since the broad outline is very similar. This year's version of the course does present new material and de-emphasizes older material.

Section 1 Introduction, APIs, and Applications.
Notes 1. Assignments (due Jan 21st): Please read the first section of the notes and the first chapter of the book. Please also read and/or do Homework 1.
Section 2. Internet Protocol. Routing. Protocol Implementation.
Assignments: Please read the second section of the notes and the fourth chapter of the book.

Feb 18: Exam 1, covering all the material in Sections 1 and 2.

Section 3. Transport layer, Transmission Control Protocol, Error Detection and Retransmission, Flow and Congestion Control
Assignments: Please read the third section of the notes and the fifth and sixth chapters of the book.

Mar 15: Exam 2, covering all the material in Section 3.

Section 4. Lower layer, Wireless, Ethernet, Learning Bridges, Switches.
Assignments: Please read the fourth section of the notes and the second and third chapters of the book.
Section 5. Public Networks, ATM, Connection-Oriented Networking, Frame Relay
Assignments: Please read the fifth section of the notes and section 3.3 of the book.
Section 6. Protocol Design: Basic Issues, Performance, Network Architecture, Security, Encoding, Compression.

The final exam covers the entire course. The final exam for this course is on Monday, May 10th at 2:15pm in POST 127.