CS 337
Syllabus
Winter 1998
The Instructor
The analog version of
Jeff Ondich
can often be found in CMC 327. His office phone number is 646-4364,
and his home number is 663-7123. His office hours for the winter
term of 1998 are Monday 5A, Tuesday 2:00-3:00, Wednesday 2A, and
Friday 2A, but he's around and available a lot of other times.
The textbook
The textbook for this class is
Computer Networks, 3rd edition, by Andrew S. Tanenbaum,
Prentice Hall, 1996.
Ethics
It's important to experiment with the Internet if you wish
to understand how it functions. I expect your experimentation
to be done with respect for the privacy and property rights
of other people and institutions. Don't wander into ethical
gray areas. Neither Carleton nor I will put up with it.
If you have an experiment you want to try, but you think it
could be viewed as a security risk, talk to Mike Tie and me first.
We'll be reading and discussing the
ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct to get a little
more idea of what the computing profession thinks is
meant by ethical conduct.
Your Grade
Your grade in the course will be determined by your performance
on two exams (25% each), a final project (20%), and homework (30%).
It is also likely that we will have a guest speaker during the
term, in which case I will multiply your cumulative score
by the number of guest speakers' talks you have attended.
Homework will include book exercises, some client/server
programming, and protocol implementations using the
cnet system.
For your final project, you will research a special topic and
present your findings in the form of a Web page. During the
final exam period, we will have a public poster session, where
the "posters" are on-line.
The Schedule
This is the approximate schedule for the course. As time passes,
this schedule will adapt to what has really happened.
- Week 1. Introduction to protocols, layered network
architectures, and Internet standards. Getting to know
UNIX networking commands.
- Week 2. Encryption, error checking and correction, and data compression.
- Week 3. Low level stuff: the physical layer, modems, how
bits and bytes are sent over telephone lines, etc.
- Week 4. The data link layer: what it's for and what sort
of algorithms it uses. Introduction to cnet.
- Week 5. More cnet. Introduction to the network
layer and routing.
- Week 6. More routing. Ethernet. Introduction to TCP/IP.
- Week 7. TCP/IP.
- Week 8. Client-server programming using Berkeley sockets.
- Week 9. To be announced.
WF 9/13-15 A brief introduction to data compression.
MW 9/18-20 A brief introduction to error-detection and correction.
F 9/20-22 A brief introduction to encryption and authentication.
MWF 9/25-29 Modems. Serial communication. RS-232.
10/2... Two weeks or so on data link and network layer algorithms.
During this time, we'll use the
cnet network simulator
developed by Chris McDonald of the University of Western Australia.
M 10/9 Midterm Break.
W 10/18 In-class midterm exam.
MWF 10/11-20 A week on the details of client/server programming using
the "Berkeley sockets" programming interface.
MWF 10/23-27 Introduction to TCP/IP.
10/30... More TCP/IP, a guest lecturer, miscellaneous topics
Jeff Ondich,
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science,
Carleton College, Northfield, MN
55057,
(507) 646-4364,
jondich@carleton.edu