Comp 343-002/443-002, Online Computer Networks, Fall 2015

Peter Dordal, Loyola University Chicago Dept of Computer Science.

The text will be An Introduction to Computer Networks, written by myself and available for free online. Note that the book is updated regularly.

My general course groundrules are here. Exams will count for between 60% to 70% of your grade, with homework and programs making up the rest.

The online Comp 343/443 will be taught more-or-less in parallel with the classroom section. Those in the online course will be expected to take the midterm and final exams along with the classroom section, although there will be some flexibility for genuine scheduling conflicts. The midterm will be Tuesday October 27 and the final will be Tuesday December 8.

My theory about online learning is that students learn best by working out hands-on examples; therefore the primary weekly activity will be reading assignments and then exercises based on that. I will make myself available twice a week for synchronous meetings; I will also answer email and post on the Sakai discussion board. Students should try to participate in one of the synchronous sessions. The tentative schedule for these is as follows:
I will use Adobe Connect. It looks like the past video issues have been resolved, but if they return then maybe we'll have to disable video. Length will be between 15 minutes to an hour, depending on demand.

While I will try to accept late homework, it is important for everyone to remain more-or-less together; this is not a "self-paced" course!

Recording full-length lectures from the face-to-face class has in the past not been terribly helpful. Instead, I have a selection of mini-lectures, ten to twenty minutes in length. These are fast-paced, with the understanding that you can pause whenever you need to.

Most of the course materials and assignments will be on sakai.

Study Guides

Midterm Guide (with link to included notes); solutions will be on Sakai a week or so before the exam.

Final Exam Guide; solutions will be on Sakai in early December.


Each week's assignment is due the Wednesday of the following week; eg September 2 for Week 1.

Homework can be submitted in .text, .odt, .doc/.docx, .xls/.xlsx, .rtf, etc. I discourage .pdf because I can't insert comments, but I will accept it. I will also accept image formats such as .jpeg (and for that matter .pdf images), but I recommend that you submit images only for those exercises for which you had to write out a diagram by hand. Some Mac formats I cannot accept simply because I cannot open them.

week read assignment
1
8/24		 Chapter 1: Overview of Networks
Chapter 1, exercises  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7
due Sept 2
2
8/31		 2.1   10-Mbps classic Ethernet
2.1.1 Ethernet Packet Format
2.1.2 Multicast
2.1.3 Ethernet Address Structure
2.1.4 LAN layer
2.1.5   Slot Time and Collisions
2.1.6   Exponential Backoff
2.2   100 Mbps (Fast) Ethernet
2.3   Gigabit Ethernet
2.4   Ethernet Switches and the learning algorithm
2.5   Spanning Tree Algorithm.
 Chapter 2, exercises 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8
due Sept 9
3
9/7		 Chapter 3: (Other LANs):
3.6: Radio / 3.7: Wi-Fi
Chapter 4 (Links): 4.1
Chapter 5 (Packets): 5.1, 5.2, 5.3
 Chapter 3: Exercises 3, 4, 5b
Chapter 4: Exercises 1 & 4
Chapter 5: Exercises 1, 2, 5, 7
due Sept 16
4
9/14		 Chapter 6 (sliding windows)
 chapter 6:  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8
due Sept 23
5
9/21		 Chapter 7: 7.1-7.7
(don't worry about numeric details of fragmentation)
Chapter 9: section 1: DV update algorithm
 Chapter 7: exercises 2, 6, 7, 8
Chapter 9: exercises 1, 3
due Sept 30
6
9/28		 Chapter 9:   section   2
(short week due to fall break)
 Chapter 9:   exercises 6, 8
due Oct 9 (Friday)
7
10/5		 Chapter 11: sections 1 & 2
Chapter 12: sections 1-3, 6-10 		Chapter 11: exercises 4, 6, 7
Chapter 12: exercises 2, 3, 4, 6
due Oct 14
8
10/12		 Chapter 3: section 7 (virtual circuits)
Chapter 9: section 5 (link-state)
Chapter 12: sections 11-19
 Chapter 3: exercises 9, 10, 11
Chapter 9: exercises 11, 12
Chapter 12: exercise 7, 8, 9
due Oct 21
9
10/19		 Chapter 11: section 3 (TFTP)
forwarder assignment
 No homework due to midterm
10
10/26		 Midterm exam
Chapter 10: sections 1-4
Chapter 13: sections 1-2
 HW9: Chapter 10, exercises 1, 2, 3, 4
Chapter 13: exercises 1, 2
Due Nov 4
11
11/2		 Chapter 10: sections 5, 6 (BGP)
Chapter 13: sections 1-4 (TCP Reno)
 HW10: Chapter 10: exercises 5, 6, 7
Chapter 13: exercises 3, 4, 5, 7
Due Nov 11
12
11/9		 Chapter 13: finish
 HW11: Ch 10, exercises 8, 9, 10
Ch 13:  6, 9, 11, 13
Due Nov 18
13
11/16		 Chapter 14: 14.1, 14.2.1-14.2.3, 14.3, 14.5, 14.6, 14.8, 14.9. 14.10
 HW12: Ch 14: exercises 1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10
Due Nov 24 (Tues)
14
11/23		 Chapter 15
  • Highspeed TCP
  • TCP Vegas
  • TCP Westwood
 HW13: Ch 13, exercise 12
Ch 14, exercises 14, 18
Ch 15, exercises 2, 3, 13 (new TCP Westwood exercise)

Due Dec 3 (Thurs)
15
11/30		 There is no week 15


java simpletalk examples

TCP: server, client,  threaded server
UDP: server, client

Notes on using ssh at Loyola

Demos

A viewer for the Internet: http://as2914.net. A galaxy-visualization tool is used to display all ISPs (as stars) and links between them.


Programming Projects

Comp 343: Stalk with ACKs
Comp 443: WUMP

Both are due Wed, Dec 2.