Comp 346/488 - Intro to Telecommunications

Peter Dordal, Loyola Univ Chicago Dept of  Computer Science. 
www.cs.luc.edu/~pld/courses/346

Text:         Data and Computer Communications, William Stallings, Sixth Edition, Prentice-Hall, 2000,ISBN 0-13-084370-9

Course groundrules. Exams will count for between 70% to 80% of your grade, with homework and programs making up the rest. The midterm is scheduled for March 12; the final is scheduled for, well, a reasonable interpretation of the schedule is that we do meet at 3:30 pm (not starting at, but it doesn't say that), which lets us schedule the final for Monday, May 5, 12:40-2:40.


Homework 1, due Friday Feb 28. Sort of.
Solutions for homework 1 are here.
Midterm study guide, now available!
Midterm study guide answers, finally finished (I do apologize for the delay).

Homework 2, due Wednesday, April 16.
Trunk Line Usage programming assignment, and Sorts.java.

Final Exam review guide. There are now some (still fairly minimal) answers here. Jason Thorn found a nice online review of leaky bucket filters, at http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~de/CN-L21.pdf; that site uses lambda and L where I used T and tau.


Course Notes

Course Outline:

What is telecommunications? How is it different from data communications?
Characteristics of voice traffic: minimal delay, even smaller variation in delay, reservations
POTS; circuit switching
Connecting exchanges
Long lines, physical transmission issues
Digitization; encoding of voice
TDM, FDM (note that there are some subtle encoding issues)
Basics of packet switching
Basics of routing
Brief review of TCP/IP

Packet switching again
ATM
Congestion management
SONET, optical fiber
Frame Relay, ISDN
Cellular phones

Chapters in book to be read are listed in parenthesis.

1. Introduction, OSI Model, Protocols and Architecture (Ch. 1,Ch. 2)

2. Data Transmission (Ch. 3)

3. Transmission Media (Ch. 4)

4. Data Encoding (Ch.  5) (new)

5. Data Communications Interface (Ch. 6)

6. Data Link Control (Ch. 7)

7. Multiplexing (Ch. 8)

Midterm

8. Circuit Switching (Ch. 9)

9. Packet Switching (Ch. 10)

10. ATM and Frame Relay (Ch. 11)

11. Congestion Control in Data Networks (Ch. 12)

12. ISDN (Appendix A)