Syllabus

We will be following the order of presentation in the book for the most part. The book is organized as a series of engineering problems and a spectrum of solutions to each. The problems include:

Chapter 1:

What are the fundamental capabilities of a network, and what behavior do we expect from a network?

Chapter 2:

How can we get data from one machine to another?

Chapter 3:

How can we move data on networks without direct connection between communicating hosts?

Chapter 4:

How do we handle heterogeneous internets?

Chapter 5:

How do we get processes to talk to each other?

Chapter 6:

How can we allocate network resources to competing data flows?

Chapter 7:

How do we communicate about the semantics of data (meta-data)?

Chapter 8:

How do we protect privacy, verify authentication, and preserve the integrity of data?

Chapter 9:

How do we handle applications with special requirements?

We will not get through all of these topics. I intend to focus on lower-level issues (Chapters 2 through 6) because they represent material that is not usually visible to users and programmers. The higher-level material is more easily accessible from other sources.