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

CSS432 is taught by three CSS professors. This section is taught by Joe McCarthy and is closely modeled after the course format used by Prof. Fukuda. Thus, it is largely oriented to programming and experiments. The course includes five programming assignments: sockets, the sliding window algorithm, TCP tools, DNS access, and a network application. To get familiar with network programming, this course section first focuses on TCP, UDP, sockets, flow control, congestion control, DNS, SMTP, FTP, and HTTP, and thereafter covers router management.