Course notes and reading material

CEG-4188 - Higher Layer Network Protocols

*** under construction ***

Note: For each chapter, the following list indicates the sections in the book by Stalling (Edition 9) that correspond to the content of the chapter and some course notes (mainly in the form of Powerpoint slides). The mention "elements of " means that the course does not cover all the details given in the book (check the course notes for checking the scope of the course). And " + some topic" means that this topic is part of the course content but it is not adequately covered by the book (check the course notes for more details). - Note that the chapter numbers in Stallings 9th edition are sometimes different than in the previous editions and that several chapters relevant for this course are not included in the book, but only provided through the Internet. Therefore, if the section numbers are different in the 9th edition, the section numbers in the 8th edition are also given in parenthesis.

1. Introduction [Stallings 1, 2 + protocol verification, conformance testing + bridges, routers, gateways] Course Notes (revised Sept 12)
• Protocol hierarchies - Protocol architecture: communication service, protocol, interfaces - Protocol engineering: specification, verification, implementation, conformance testing - Protocol standards - Network and end-to-end protocols - Historical perspective
2. Review of network issues (not really "higher layer protocols") [IP: Stallings 18.1-4, elements of 18.5; QoS: Stallings elements of 20 (8th ed: 19.3-7); MPLS: Stallings elements of 21 (8th ed: not covered)] Course Notes (revised Sept 12)
• IP addressing (IPv4 and IPv6) - Network QoS: definitions, flows - Mechanisms for providing QoS at the network level: "IntServ", "DiffServ", MPLS
3. Transport layer [Stallings 22 (8th ed: 20)] Course Notes - in preparation
• Reliable transport service - The socket interface - TCP : reliable connection establishment, data transfer, flow control, mechanisms for avoiding network congestion - Port numbers - flow identification, reserved port numbers - UDP
4. Names and addressing [Naming schemes; DNS: Stallings 26.1 (8th ed: 23.1)] Course Notes - in preparation
• Naming and addressing schemes - The Domain Name Service (DNS) - Identification of files, applications, name spaces, URI, object identifiers
5. The WEB [] Course Notes - in preparation
• Historical perspective - HTTP - HTML - Client-side programming, e.g. Java Script, AJAX - XML and structure definitions (DTD and XML Schema) - Other presentation layer protocols: e.g. MIME codes
6. Performance considerations Course Notes - in preparation
• Quality of service at the application level - Review of queuing models - assumptions - Traffic statistics (Poisson distribution or self-similar traffic) - Service architectures: server pools, multi-tier architectures, the Cloud - Identification of partners, server selection
7. Service-Oriented Architecure (Remote procedure calls - RPC) Course Notes - in preparation
• The RPC concept (Java RMI as an example) - Protocols: RMI, CORBA, Web Services (SOAP) - Notations for defining service interfaces: Java, IDL, WSDL - BPEL – a notation for defining process behavior - Directories: how to find initially a remote server object
8. Multimedia communication Course Notes - in preparation
• Digital encodings of sound, images and video - Multimedia streaming, RTP - IP telephony: SIP, SDP and other protocols, such as H.323
9. Security Course Notes - in preparation
• Review of basic notions of security (see course on Security) (Security requirements - Encryption methods - Authentification and signatures) - Basic security protocols: IPsec, SSL - Other issues: steganography, watermarks, access protection for multimedia, electronic money
10. Multi-casting and group management Course Notes - in preparation
• Broadcasting at the subnetwork level - IP layer multi-casting (allocation of multicast addresses, limited implementation (MBONE), alternative proposals) - Application-level multi-casting
11. Distributed systems management Course Notes - in preparation
• Models of distributed systems: the concept of a MIB - Administration paradigm (get/set methods) and protocols (RPC, SNMP) - The Internet MIB - Transaction management: ACID properties, two-phase commit protocol

Created: August 26, 2010; revised Sept. 5