Textbook and Other Readings.

The initial course introduction was greatly facilitated by publication of the text "Computer Networks" by Andrew Tannenbaum. This book has remained the principal textbook for the course since its introduction. While the Tannenbaum book provides a reasonably good introduction to the subject, there are a number of important topics which are not covered and others where the coverage is either not sufficiently complete, not up-to-date or too theoretical. Hence, it has been very important to supplement the Tannenbaum book by other readings. This has included a number of protocol standards documents. Standards documents are generally not fun reading. However, students benefit by reading such documents because they give a complete presentation of all aspects of the protocol being described. It is also instructive for students to understand that even simple protocols must deal with error conditions and special cases and that these add complexity not immediately apparent from the state diagram for the non-error cases. Students also read a number of published papers, for example, "Congestion Avoidance and Control" by Van Jacobson (Proc. SIGCOMM '88). In addition, course notes have been used for certain topics such as bridges, routers and routing algorithms, CO/CL gatewaying and OSI protocols.