To see how these topics have changed since the course has taken a greater focus on the application later, compare this version of the topic level learning goals to the ones in revision 1.3.

1. The two parts of networking
   • the technology that actually exchanges data
   • the rules/semantics (protocol) for the data exchange
2. Explain what the network fallacies are/mean:
   • (network reliability, latency is zero, infinite bandwidth ...)
3. Organization, at a very high level, of the end systems + routers + communications links
4. Organization role of protocols, network of networks, standards
5. Network of networks
   • layering, tiering
6. Protocol properties, reliable delivery, ordering, best effort
7. Properties of networks, delay, bandwidth, errors, throughput
8. Sharing of bandwidth
9. (Maybe) Case for packet switching
10. What contributes to delay, including queuing delay
11. Interpreting traceroute with respect to delay meanings
12. idea and purpose of protocol layering
13. basic network security/vulnerability issues (trojans, man in the middle etc)
14. Application level protocol examples & how information is exchanged
    • web/http as a bi-directional connected streams, client server model
    • ftp - difference between a control channel and out of band data channel
    • mail protocols - fact that there is no guarantee of who is sending mail
    • DNS - large distributed application - not based on connections - how it works
    • P2P example (bittorrent - edonkey, DHT)
15. Addressing - role of IP address and port
16. Effect of different latency, throughput, loss etc on application designs
17. Performance HTTP as an example of ways to make things go faster
18. multiplexing and demultiplexing and how it is used - perhaps http server and handling multiple requests at the same time can be used to illustrate this in some way.
19. creating a reliable data stream from an unreliable one
    • dealing with lost/corrupt data
    • maintaining order, if needed
    • timeouts, ACKS, NACKS, etc
    • sequence numbers
20. Performance with respect to retransmission scenarios - sliding windows, selective ACK, go back N, sequence numbers
21. Event response diagrams for reliable protocol
22. Estimating round trip time and using it to set timeout values
23. Connection setup
24. Connection termination
25. Congestion what it is and how it occurs
26. Performance issues of congestion
27. IP addresses, subnetting, and CIDR
28. DHCP - what it does, why it is useful
29. IP address assignment from ICANN
30. How NAT works - issues and problems
31. Why NAT is used
32. Where can errors during transmission occur and how are they detected - checksums, CRC end-to-end arguments
33. Sharing of a channel (Bandwidth)