An introductory course in computer communication and networks

Abstract

This paper reports on the curriculum contents and experience obtained in the teaching of a semester-long introductory course in computer communication networks. The course is aimed at first year graduate and senior undergraduate students and covers a broad survey of networking issues. We focus on all seven layers of the OSI reference model and assign four major programming projects to reinforce the ideas covered in lectures. Projects include writing the client side of a client-server program that implements a sliding window data-link layer protocol complete with acknowledgements and retransmissions, writing client and server programs that interact via remote procedure calls, and writing client and server programs that use UDP datgrams to locate and register services with a name server utility and TCP to actually invoke services registered with the name server.