15-849 Syllabus: Networking in Challenging Environments

Textbooks

There are no required textbooks for the course. If you don't feel like you're up on the background for the course, a few texts you might want to use are:

General networking: Computer Networks: A Systems Approach, third edition, by Larry Peterson and Bruce Davie. The library has a few copies of this book.
Wireless: Wireless Communications & Networks by William Stallings, 1st Ed., Prentice Hall, 2002. This book focuses more on physical and lower layer issues, and provides a reasonable background for those subjects.

Some good references for the programming and protocols side of things are:

TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The Protocols by W. Richard Stevens.
Unix Network Programming: Networking APIs: Sockets and XTI (Volume 1) by W. Richard Stevens.

Finally, if you're not already familiar with them, this course would be a grand time to start familiarizing yourself with Subversion or CVS and with LaTeX.

Prerequisites

This class is appropriate for first-year graduate students with a strong background in networks, or for students who have taken the graduate networking class or equivalent. We will assume familiarity with the general operation of routing protocols, TCP, and application protocols such as HTTP.

Grading

Grading will be based on participation, paper presentations, and a semester-long project.

30% discussion leading (3 x 10%).
10% participation / attendance
60% project

Schedule

Also available as an ical file that you can subscribe to.

Papers will not be handed out in class. Please print the readings and read them before class. After the first week, we will have signups for students to present the papers.

Date	Instructor	Topics	Notes	Readings