Course Details
• This part consists of lectures and workshops. Syllabus, slides/notes
are online at the following URL and on Blackboard:
● http://www-users.aston.ac.uk/~blowkj/internetworks/index.htm
• lectures on advanced photonic networks (Level 7 only)
● Dr H Hamza
• Network Simulator (Level 7 and 6) - 3 lab sessions of 3 hours each
• Assessment (Level 7) • Assessment (Level 6)
● Lecture Material 75% ● Lecture Material 70%
● Course Work 10% ● Course Work 15%
● Lab assessment 15% ● Lab assessment 15%
Deadlines
See Blackboard assignments page
NS laboratory
RFC coursework
All work to be submitted through Blackboard
Main
Course Books
Tanenbaum A.S, Computer Networks 3rd ed, Prentice
Hall (1996) ISBN 0-13-349945-6
Supplementary
D E. Comer, R E. Droms, Computer Networks and
Internets 2nd ed, Prentice Hall (1998), ISBN 0-13-
083617-6
J.E.Flood, Telecommunications Switching, Traffic and
Networks, Prentice Hall (1995), ISBN 0-13-033309-3
Optical Networks, A Practical Perspective by
Ramaswami and Sivarajan, ISBN 1-55860-445-6
D. E. Comer, Internetworking with TCP/IP, Printice
Hall, ISBN 0-13-018380-6
Course Material
• Available in html or pdf format
– On Blackboard
– On my website
• Recordings of lectures also available
• Two sets of sample problems
• Past Exam papers
• Additional lecture material not in the course
Logical vs Physical
• e.g. These lectures
● 13 lectures, 3 workshops
● 18 physical 1 hour slots
● may not be a simple mapping
• addressing
● logical network addresses
● e.g. IP addresses
● physical network addresses
● e.g. wavelength
Data Networks
• Transmission
● Sending data from A to B over a single link
● usually connection-oriented
● can be data independent
• Networking
● Involves switching
● often involves specific types of data
Packet: Header Payload Trailer
Internet Growth
Number of
connected
computers
Time
Internet Growth
Number of
connected Logarithmic plot
computers
Time
Recent Data (2012)
YouTube
● 4 billion views a day, up 30% over the last eight months
● 800M unique users visit You Tube each month
● In 2011, ~ 140 views for every person on earth (over 1 Trillion
views)
● More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major
US networks created in 60 years
– Source - http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics
Internet video traffic is growing at 48% CAGR (i.e., per year) (Cisco)
● In 2015, the gigabyte equivalent of all movies ever made will
cross global IP networks every 5 minutes. (Cisco)
– Source - Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and
Methodology, 2010-2015
Applications
• Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
• File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
• Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)
• Telnet
• Voice over IP
• Multimedia
Single Link
• Bandwidth
A • Error rate/ Signal to noise ratio
• Data Rate
• Failure probability
Network
Switched Shared Access
Topology
Fully Interconnected Network
Network size of N nodes
So we have: L = N(N-1)/2 point to point links
Scales very badly with N
Incremental network cost is L(N+1)-L(N)
= (N+1)(N)/2- N(N-1)/2
=N
So the cost of adding a new node increases as the network
grows, there is no economy of scale.
Network Problems
• Routing information • Quality of Service
• Unique addresses • Congestion
• Rogue packets • Flow Control
• Node/ switch/ router failures • Errors
• Security • Network measurements
• Internetworking • Applications
• Abstraction
Internet Resources
Tannenbaum home page
(http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast)
Material on Comer Book
(http://netbook.cs.purdue.edu)
RFC’s
(http://www.rfc-editor.org/)
example - RFC 1288, finger
Next Lecture
• Protocol stacks
● OSI
● TCP/IP
