Comp 346/446 - Intro to Telecommunications

Spring 2012: Tuesdays 4:15-6:45, LT 410 (Windoze lab)

This course will use sakai, not blackboard.

Text: there is no official primary text. The following may be useful as a supplementary text: William Stallings, Data and Computer Communications, eighth or ninth edition, Prentice-Hall

General course groundrules are here. Exams will count for between 70% to 80% of your grade, with homework and programs making up the rest. The midterm will be  Tuesday, March 19. The final will be Tuesday, April 30, at our usual class time.

Course notes

Assignments

Java files

Here is my brief document on spread spectrum.

More documentation

• A good exposition of the Strowger switch
• Notes on CSMA by Jeff Andrews
• ATM Forum Traffic Management document, contains definition of GCRA (section 4), but tends to refer to things before they are defined.
• Here's a Lily Tomlin bit on what life was like under the telephone-company monopoly.
• RFC 2205, the defining document for RSVP.
• A pictorial history of telephones (a description for each phone is below the thumbnails)

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)