TCP/IP Architectures and Protocols

Lectures:
24 h

Recommended for
All ECSEL students.

Goals

The goal of the course is to provide an overview of the numerous existing and emerging communication protocols and services that comprise the core functionality of the Internet. After the course a student should have an understanding, based on knowledge of the underlying technologies, of the possibilities and limitations present in the current Internet. The student should also be familiar with ongoing to development and its possible impact on the kind of services that will be available to the end user in the future.

Prerequisites

• Undergraduate network technology course
• Basic Computer Security Related Courses
• Basic Computer Security
• Cryptology
• Applied Network Security

Organization
Lectures and seminars. Optional individual project assignment.

Contents

The course touch upon many areas as shown below. Security issues and concerns are covered as an integrate part of all areas. The course starts out with a recapitulation of basic principles, concepts and terminology such as network layers and the OSI reference model taught in introductory network technology courses.

The Internet has an interesting history. The course will provide some figures on the size, growth of the Internet as well as knowledge about the organization behind it and of standards and standardization process. The course will look a bit closer at the Swedish University Network (SUNET) to provide the student with an of an overview of available technology as well as its structure and organization. Network resources at Linköping University will be studied in some detail. Working its way through the network layers, the course will look at the properties of different physical and link layer technologies such as IEEE 802, FDDI, ATM, ISDN, and Wireless networks.

Network and transport layer protocols comprise the core of Internet technology. The course will provide an overview of protocols such as IPv4, IPv6, UDP, TCP, ICMP, ARP, RARP, DHCP, BOOTP, and IP Multicasting.

Getting network packages from source to destination requires routing. The course look at two routing protocols: OSPF and RIP.

The Internet would be difficult to use without symbolic addresses such as "www.liu.se" and "ftp.sunsite.com". The course investigates the workings of the Domain Name System (DNS) that makes possible the use of such names.

End users often connect to the Internet using serial line dial-up connections. The course looks at SLIP and PPP, two point-to-point protocols for this purpose.

In recent years, an important use of the public Internet has become to utilize it as an infrastructure for a Virtual Private Network (VPN) within an organization. The course gives a basic understanding of the technology and problems involved in this.

At the application level, the course covers the most commonly used data transfer protocols, such as for instance FTP, NNTP, and HTTP. Alongside HTTP and the World Wide Web, e-mail is today the most commonly used Internet service and the course covers all of the important protocols and standards involved: SMTP, POP3, IMAP, X.400, and MIME.

Application programmers who need to utilize network services have a number of programming interfaces to choose from. The course will give an orientation about the most commonly used ones, such as BSD sockets and TLI, alongside with an account of the principles, protocols, tools and interfaces of Sun Remote Procedure Calls (Sun RPC and XDR). A part of the optional individual project work is to implement a simple NFS server using RPC.

Managing large networks and its connected resources is often a formidable task. The course looks at what Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is and how it can help facilitate network administration.

The rapid development of the Internet constantly make possible new applications. The course will discuss IP-telephony and other emerging new uses of the Internet.

New applications also put new demands on performance and service quality and availability. The course will give an introduction to the area of Quality of Service and the ideas, tools and protocols that exist there to meet these new demands.

Today's Internet is a rather chaotic creation. However, the increasing use of the Internet and organizations growing dependency on it creates a need for third party services that can be trusted. The course looks at some such services and strives to incite discussion about what new services will be possible and/or needed in the future.

Literature

Articles, Internet RFCs, and Stevens: TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The Protocols.

Teachers
Nahid Shahmehri

Examiner
Nahid Shahmehri

Schedule
Sept-Oct 2000.

Examination

Lecture attendance and active seminar participation. Term paper.

Credit
5 + 2 credits

Comments
Invited teachers will give some of the seminars.

Page responsible: Director of Graduate Studies