Programme

PART 1: The application level. The point of view of the applications. Network service QoS. Design of scalable architectures for Web services. Internet data center arn account chitectures. Content delivery networks. Peer-to-peer networks and distributed hash tables.
PART 2: The relationship between transport and application layers. The socket library and its use.
PART 3: Congestion control and the transport layer. Transport techniques. TCP and congestion control. Focus: TCP exercises and examples.
PART 4: Routing metodologies and technologies. Routing algorithm for the network infrastructure. Link-State-Packet algorithms. Routing protocols and the Internet network. Software Defined Networks. Spanning tree computation for switched networks.
PART 5: Interdomain routing. Border Gateway Protocol. Scalability of BGP. Internet architecture. Internet data analysis. Design of a transit AS. Stability of BGP protocol.
PART 6: Virtual networks. Virtual local networks (VLAN). Evolution of the Spanning Tree Protocol. MPLS-based Virtual Private Networks.
PART 7: IPv6. NAT and IPv4 exhaustion. Basics of IPv6 protocol and address space. ICMPv6. Source address selection and multihoming. IPv4-IPv6 transition mechanisms.

Core Documentation

Slides provided by the teacher and downloadable day by day from the course website: http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~impianti/
In order to download the slides a userid-password pair is necessary (ask the teacher at maurizio.patrignani@uniroma3.it)

Type of delivery of the course

Lectures with slides projected. The teacher will configure routers in an emulated scenario during the class. Students are encouraged to bring their laptops in the class to reproduce the configurations step by step.

Attendance

The slides are verbose enough to allow students to pass the exam even if it is not possible for them to attend all lessons.

Type of evaluation

The final grade is obtained for the 40% from a practical test in the laboratory and for the 60% from an oral test. The oral test lasts from 20 to 30 minuts and is composed of two or three questions on the topics of the course program. Such a test is meant to evaluate the knowledge and understanding abilities of the students; their ability to make judgements; and their communication skills with respect to the computer network domain. The practical test in the laboratory lasts 2 or 3 hours and consists in the configuration in a computer network emulator of a network featuring both intradomain network protocols (for example RIP or OSPF) and interdomain protocols (BGP). Such a test is meant to evaluate the ability of the students to apply knowledge and understanding and their ability of making judgements which is necessary for devise non-trivial configuration. Plenty examples of practical tests can be found in the website of the Netkit network emulator (http://wiki.netkit.org/index.php/Labs_Exams). The practical test in the laboratory can be replaced by four smaller tests held in the laboratory during the course. The final grade for the practical test is obtained by averaging the ranking of the three best laboratory tests (we don't reckon the test with the lower grade or the one where the student was absent). Participating during the course to these smaller laboratory tests does not rule out the participation to the final practical test. However, if the student shows up at the final practical test it is assumed that the possible grade obtained from the smaller tests held during the course is canceled. Also, the grade obtained via the smaller tests held during the course can be used only in the February exam session of the same Academic Year. Attention please: during the COVID-19 lockdown periods the exam will be an oral test in accordance with Art.1 of Decreto Rettorale n°. 703 (5 May 2020). The oral test will be fundamental for passing the exam.