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.

This course is taught by Prof. Athirai Irissapane and is closely modelled after the course format used by Prof. Fukuda and the lecture slides of the book Computer Networks, a systems approach. It is largely oriented to programming and experiments. The course actually includes five programming assignments: sockets, the sliding window algorithm, TCP tools, DNS accesses, 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.