EE 706 - Communication Networks

Course offered in:

Spring 2019-2020

Instructor:

Prof. Sharayu Mohrir

Course Contents and Structure:

The course starts off with the OSI model of the internet – condensed into 4 layers for better understanding. These are – physical layer, network layer, transport layer and application layer. The course focusses mainly on the network and the transport layer – broadly, we study how information, in the form of packets, goes from one point in the internet to other, and with the assurance that the data sent has been received. We see the basic algorithms and ideas that govern the Internet Protocol, that of diving data into packets and identifying it by source and destination based on headers.

We are also exposed briefly (we could only begin the topic because of the pandemic) to congestion control – how, in the internet as vast and interconnected as it is, data is transferred quickly and reliably.

Feedback on lectures:

The lectures were very well organised. The professor used the blackboard to teach, and the explanations were easy to follow.

Since the topics taught are not straight out of any book, it is a good idea to maintain good, clean notes.

The lectures were such that one can understand and appreciate the need for and requirements of all the complex protocols that the modern internet uses.

Feedback on tutorials and exams:

Tutorial problems were provided regularly; these weren’t particularly hard but required a very clear understanding of the concepts taught in class. If you follow the lecture content, make notes and revise them regularly (sounds like a cliche, but its true :P) then they are not at all difficult. The same goes for the examinations.

A couple of coding assignments were also given. These are not intended to test you, but expose you to how the algorithms and ideas the course talks about materialise in the real world.

Difficulty: (on a scale of 1 being very easy to 5 being very hard) 2

Textbooks and References:

  • Computer Networking – A Top Down Approach by Kurose and Ross
  • Data Networks – Bertsekas and Gallagher

The latter is only a reference book, in that it has a lot more math of queuing theory and probabilistic analysis, but the explanations given in the book and the way they build your intuition is unparalleled

Grading Statistics: All S given (because of the pandemic)

Additional Comments & what you learnt from the course:

The course is relatively easy, but the way it is taught is very good in terms of understanding why the internet is the way it is, and how its founders came about solving this problem of communicating in a network of hosts.

Review by – Shaurya Chopra (shaurya.chopra@gmail.com)