Instructor: Professor Don Towsley
Office: A337 Graduate Research Center
Office Hours: M 1:30-2:30PM, T 11:00- 12:00AM, W 2:00-3:00 and by appointment
Phone: 413-545-0207
FAX: 413-545-1249
e-mail: towsley@cs.umass.edu

Content: This course provides an introduction to fundamental concepts in the design and implementation of computer communication networks, their protocols, and applications. Topics to be covered include: layered network architectures, applications, network programming interfaces (e.g., sockets), transport, congestion, routing, and data link protocols, local area networks, network security, network management, and emerging high-speed networks. Examples will be drawn primarily from the Internet (e.g., TCP, UDP, and IP) protocol suite. There will be four written assignments, three programming assignments (in C), one midterm and one final exam.

This course will be lectured to both graduate and undergraduate students. Students enrolled for graduate-level credit will be required to complete additional homework problems (generally a superset of those assigned to undergraduates) and additional readings from the literature.

Teaching assistants: TA information including contact information, available separately.

Prerequisites:

1. A rudimentary understanding of computer architecture and operating systems, while not required, would be helpful.
2. You must be able to program in a structured high-level programming language, like C, C++ or Java. Programming assignments will be in C/UNIX.

Course Materials:

1. Recommended Texts:
   • Computer Networks, Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Prentice Hall, 3^rd edition, 1996.
   • Data Networking and Internet Protocols, K. Ross, J. Kurose.
   • Assigned readings from magazines, manuals, and the WWW; this material will be placed on reserve in the Physical Sciences library, and made avilable to off campus students.
   • Class Notes: Class notes (highly recommended) will be posted on the class WWW site (see "On-line materials" below"). If you want to purchase a hardcopy of the notes (rather than printing them yourself, which wouldn't cost you anything), contact the course instructor
   • On-line materials. A WWW site is maintained for the course.
     Web site: http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/cs653-99.
     Everything that is handed out in class is posted on this WWW site. As the semester goes along, the site will fill up with lots of useful other information, pointers to other sites, etc. Check out and use this site!

     A broadcast class email address, cs653@cs.umass.edu, has been created. If you send mail to this address, it will be broadcast to the 120 or so students in the class, so please use it wisely and carefully. I will use it to broadcast information of interest to everyone. You might want to use it to broadcast a question, or give a pointer to material that you think will be of general interest. See documentation about how to add/delete yourself from the class broadcast email list.
     

Coursework