CNP&A Course Plan
The
Second (and final) CNPA assessed test is here.
To take the test, you need to use your UH EMail address (but leave out the
"@herts.ac.uk" bit as your name and
your student number as your group number.
Your student number begins 99, 98, ... 95, 94 and is 8 digits long.
The following course plan will be updated from time to time.
This version updated Tuesday 18th April, 2000
to add notes on MIME.
End of chapter questions:
Chapters 1, 2, part of 3
(unchanged from before)
Chapter 4 questions
(unchanged from before)
Chapter 5 questions
(unchanged from before)
Chapter 6 questions
Chapter 7 questions
CNPA Prototype test (one question only)
NEW (10th Feb): There are some network simulators
for use in the practicals.
They are located at http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~comqpq/netsims/
where you will find a readme.text file
which explains that you
should find here subdirectories with Windows95/NT executables, Linux
executables, SunOS (VADS) and the (Ada!) source files used.
You will also find the instruction sheets under the 'docs' subdirectory as both
Rich Text Format (.rtf) files (that can be handled by many word processors,
including Microsoft Word) and as plain ascii text files (.txt).
The plan is horribly inaccurate, but still gives some indication of what
the course is meant to cover.
| UH Week: |
02 |
Date: |
Thursday 7th October |
| L1 |
JAM |
History, Applications, and Topologies |
Handouts/References:
http://www.cs.herts.ac.uk/~comqjam/CNPA/History.html
P&D Section 1.1 |
| L2 |
JAM |
Traffic Characterisation |
Handouts/References:
http://www.cs.herts.ac.uk/~comqjam/CNPA/Traffic.html
P&D Section 1.2 |
| Tutorials cum Practicals |
Make sure you have an account to use the computer science SUN
workstations, and learn how to use them.
There is a handout to help with this.
This should be available at the class.
|
| Questions |
Note... the following is just a test.
The week
one test includes questions on network topologies and
traffic characterisation.
|
Initial version
-
History, Applications, and Topologies: Star terminal network/master-slave/telnet,
Random WAN/peer/ftp, Bus or Ring LAN/netware, Internet/WWW,
multimedia/integrated networks
-
Traffic Characterisation and Bandwidth: including voice, video. Delay, error rate,
and throughput. How these vary: jitter, burst errors, peaks in demand.
-
Need for, and kinds of Switching (including ATM?): Message, Packet,
Circuit, ATM and Cut through switching
-
Service (API) for portability, and Protocol for interworking: CO vs CL.
-
Three kinds of client server application: Web, Database, RPC (plus
mention special protocols: telnet, ftp, snmp).
-
More about the Web: Developing html; role and purpose of CGI/Server API/ASP;
Javascript/VBScript, java applets, activeX/COM objects, etc
Week (or maybe two) off to develop Web pages,
and learn more about it themselves,
including Web issues for disabled users, anti-post-modernism, etc.
This should be a major practical activity.
-
ODBC (or maybe JDBC):
-
ODBC, continued, and Applications of it:
-
Peer to peer applications were covered briefly earlier,
Broadcast applications metamorphosed into Real Time Continuous Media.
Handouts/References:
http://www.cs.herts.ac.uk/~comqjam/CNPA/continuous-media-v07.html
which contains a reference to the other handout that was given out.
-
Media, signals, speed of light, modulation, encoding:
[P&D] 3.1.2, 1.2.4, 3.2
-
Synchronisation and framing:
[P&D] 3.3
-
MAC protocols:
[P&D] 3.6
-
Mac protocols on rings (reservation) fddi, IBM TR, or similar:
[P&D] 3.7
Many of the
end of
chapter questions in Peterson and Davey should
be attempted. Some are straightforward, others require thought,
and some require investigation.
-
MACAW, or similar paper on more recently developed MAC protocol:
-
Error detection and FEC (?Turbocoding?):
[P&D] 3.4
-
Error recovery by ARQ protocol (BER), stop and wait/alternating bit:
[P&D] 3.5.1
-
Efficiency -- sliding window protocols:
[P&D] 3.5.2
-
Switching, forwarding, contention, and (idea of) routing:
[P&D] 4.1
-
Hardware switching:
[P&D] 4.4
End of chapter 4 questions from P&D that you could do at this
point are 4.1,2,3,4,5,12,13,16.
-
Bridging, the distributed spanning tree algorithm:
[P&D] 5.1
The Christmas break is here.
The next three weeks have been updated (Jan 2000),
but the rest of the document has not so there are some inconsistencies.
- Lecture 1, first week of term (13th Jan 2000)
Ways of interconnecting networks. Networks can be connected by
- Repeaters, also known as hubs
- Bridges (dealt with in this lecture, particularly the
distributed spanning tree algorithm:
see [P&D] 5.1)
- Routers (see lecture 2 of this week, and later in the course too)
The extended "sidebar" on pages 234 ... 237 is useful.
- Lecture 2, first week of term (13th Jan 2000)
Internetting, see [P&D] 5.2, but not all of it.
At this stage only subsections 5.2.1, 5.2.2 (but not
fragmentation), 5.2.3, and 5.2.4.
End of chapter 5 questions from P&D that you should try include
5.1,3,7,8,9,12,16.
Make sure your answer to 5.16 is clear and specific, not vague and imprecise.
Students doing the 2-module CNPA course will need to know more about
routing, and we will cover it later in the course,
but students doing the 1-module course Computer Networks need know only that.
- Lectures 1 and 2, second week of term (20th Jan 2000)
For students doing the 1-module course Computer Networks, revision.
Lecture 1 (in C450 at 10:00) will be directed but lecture 2
(in C454 at 12:00)
will be a student driven question and answer session.
For students doing the 2-module course CNPA, service models
and what happens when we go faster. [P&D 9]
- Third week of term (27th Jan 2000)
The exams break: no classes. Read the "End to end" paper, already mentioned
but now given out for you to study yourselves.
The following weeks are still to be revised:
-
Internetworking with IPv4:
[P&D] 5.2
-
IP over Ethernet (incl ARP, and exemplifying encapsulation):
[P&D] 5.2.5 [Comer] 5
-
Subnetting, Supernetting (these will die with IPv4, but around
for a while yet):
[P&D] 5.3.1, 5.3.3
-
IPv6:
[P&D] 5.4 [Comer] 29
- The exams break: possibly read the "End to end" paper.
-
Transport protocols, UDP, and layering:
[P&D] 6.1
-
TCP -- flow control:
[P&D] 6.2 [Comer] 13
-
TCP -- congestion control:
[P&D] 8.3
-
Other congestion control approaches (RED G/w, DECbit):
[P&D] 8.4
-
Segmentation and reassembly (in IPv4, and in AAL3/4 and AAL5):
[Comer] 7.7, 18.9
-
TCP over ATM:
[Comer] 18
-
Heterogeneity of Representation (presentation layer), including MIME:
[P&D] 7.1
-
ASN-1, BER:
-
RPC, Java rmi:
-
Network management (MIBs as an ASN-1 application):
[P&D] Appendix A [Comer] 26
-
ISO model and review of layering:
[P&D] 1.3
-
What happens when we go faster (1): at present this is chapter 9
of [P&D] but in the new edition it will be all over the place.
[P&D] 9.1, 9.2 Latency and throughput issues.
-
What happens when we go faster (2):
[P&D] 9.3 Service models for integrated services
-
What happens when we go faster (paper):
This is an active research area, so it should be easy to find a
bang up to date paper to cover here.
-
Naming (mostly review layering in another guise):
-
Spare (or review of topics and principles):
The Easter break is here
- After Easter, three weeks of revision. Initially directed,
later student driven.
[Comer] is volume 1 of "Internetworking with TCP/IP" 3e by Douglas E. Comer
[P&D] is "Computer Networks a systems approach" 1e by Peterson and Davey.
Refs are to the first edition.
This will be the course text.
The second edition of this book is on the way, and has a
different chapter structure even though the relationships are fairly clear.
If it is published before all the students have copies of the book,
I will produce references to both books.
There is a further "Reading week" to be added.
I'm not sure where this should go or what we should do.
One suggestion is an exercise on RPC, but I have reservations about this.
Finally, please suggest any missing topics.
For example I have just realised that I've left out
routing protocols (distance vector and link state).
James A. Malcolm