[e2e] typical network syllabus

[Tarik Alj]

On Tuesday 30 October 2001 11:54, Constantinos Dovrolis wrote:
> A related question is whether one semester-based course
> in networking is enough these days. Especially at a
> graduate program, it would make sense to have an "advanced
> networking course" with a totally different syllabus than
> the (required?) undergraduate networking course.

I would like to add my 2c: MSc and PhD students at INRS-Telecommunications in 
the network group take 6 and 4 courses respectively. Among them are :

- Protocols  (covers OSI layers and corresponding protocols)
- Protocol design 
- Performance study  (queueing systems, simulation)
- Distributed Systems 
- Network Architecture 
- Network Design

an MSc student takes 3 courses a semester for 2 semesters, a PhD student 2 
courses.

Distributed Systems and protocol courses used to be considered "pure 
software" and the others "pure network". Which means when you were in the 
networks grp you learned optimisation techniques to design networks with 
delay - capacity constraints and you did not really care about the protocols 
and vice versa. Luckily this changed 2 years ago when i did my masters. 

My point is there were, traditionnaly, 2 approaches : the one from the telco/ 
circuit world i'd say, where you had a set of constraints and a bunch of 
equations and the one from the computer world which is a bit more practical.

I believe networking is a field with many topics and different approaches, 
you might take one or two courses to get an overview and that's as much as 
you should expect from it.   
 

>
> Such graduate-level courses are given today in several
> schools and they mainly cover research papers. Having a textbook
> that is appropriate for such a 2nd course would be quite
> useful I think. Possible topics could be:
> - Router architectures
> - "Internet algorithmics" (IP lookups, flow classification)
> - Packet scheduling
> - Intradomain routing and going deeper in OSPF
> - Interdomain routing and going deeper in BGP
> - TCP's congestion control and recent advancements (e.g., SACK)
> - QoS and traffic management
> - Multicasting protocols
> - Traffic modeling and measurements
> - Networking security issues
> - HTTP and other Web-related protocols
> - Web middleware
> - Streaming apps
> -  (...)

...

-Tarik.