The course examines methods for designing LANs and WANs that optimize Quality of Service (QoS). It covers theoretical and practical element of the OSI protocol stack; routing protocols including OSPF and BGP; networking management/architecture; router configuration; security; and Internet policies. The class explores emerging networking technologies.

CSS432 is now given by two CSS professors: Profs. Erdly and Fukuda. This section is taught by Prof. Fukuda and largely oriented to programming and experiments like the other courses he is teaching. The course actually includes four programming assignments: TCP communication, the sliding window algorithm, TCP tools, and a network application. To get familiar with network programming, this section first focuses on TCP, UDP, sockets, flow control, congestion control, DNS, SMTP, FTP, and HTTP, and thereafter discusses about router management.