ECE 564 - Fall 2011
Advanced Topics in Computer Networks

 

Time and Place

Tuesday and Thursday 11:00am - 12:15pm, Room 411, Harvill Building.

Instructor

Dr. Marwan Krunz
ECE Building, Room 365
Phone: (520) 621-8731
Email: krunz@email.arizona.edu
Office Hours: Tuesdays 3-4pm and Thursdays 4-5pm (and by appointment)

Syllabus and Tentative Topics

xx Class Material

There is no textbook for this course. The material will be covered from the following sources:

Homework Assignments and Handouts

To be added.

Assigned Reading (Unless indicated otherwise, students are responsible for all assigned reading material)

Articles from the literature will be continuously assigned throughout the semester and will be listed on this page. Electronic copies can often be downloaded from the UA Digital Library (or provided by the instructor, when possible). Material not available in electronic form should be purchased from the EES Copy Center. Check this page periodically for the latest assigned reading.

Prerequistes

Course Objectives

In recent years, computer networks have been undergoing significant changes in their design principles, architectures, protocols, and application scenarios. Emerging networks are expected to carry diverse traffic types (e.g., video, audio, images, and text), some of which have stringent delay and packet-loss transport requirements. Quality-of-service (QoS) support became a fundamental block in the design of intelligent networks. The exponential growth of the web has made it critical to deploy web caching mechanisms at end-systems (clients and servers) as well as within the network. Network services have been extended to the wireless domain (e.g., via WiFi and Bluetooth), allowing for seamless wired/wireless connectivity based on cellular as well as "ad hoc" architectures. Sensor networking is emerging as an enabling technology for many exciting sensor-based application domains, including environment monitoring, seismic-structure response, marine microorganisms, etc.

The goal of this course is to expose students to recent advances in wired and wireless networks, with focus on the architectural and protocol aspects underlying the design and operation of such networks. These aspects include, among others, medium access protocols, routing protocols, quality-of-service provisioning, traffic control, flow control, protocols for wireless LANs, ad hoc networks, sensor networks, etc. (see list of topics). In the process of learning network architectures and protocols, students will be exposed to various analytical methods that are used in the design and engineering of next-generation networks. They will also use simulations to evaluate the performance of various design concepts.



Grading:

Remark:  Your homework assignments may require you to perform numerical computations or run discrete-event simulations. For assignments that require numerical computations, you will need to write your own code using C or Matlab. For assignments involving discrete-event simulations, you are REQUIRED to use the Csim software. Csim is a C-based programming environment for discrete-event simulation, developed by Mesquite Software. I will spend 1-2 weeks reviewing the basics of Csim, but that will not be enough to cover all of its features. Therefore, you should start reading the Csim documentation on your own as soon as possible, and before I cover it in class. Csim's User's Guide is available online at http://www.mesquite.com/ (under `Documentation').