The set of topics in this course are listed below. Click on their links to see details such as: lecture notes, chapters from textbooks, links to interesting websites, and videos of the lecture.
Defines data communications and presents a simple model of communication systems, with examples of communications across a link and network.
Communication signals; Properties of sinusoids; Bandwidth, spectrum, data rate; Analog vs digital; Errors and noise; Transmission capacity.
Spectrum and design issues; Guided and unguided media; Twisted pair, coaxial cable and optical fibre; Wireless transmission concepts and antennas.
Transmitting: digital data as digital signals; digital data as analog signals; analog data as digital signals; analog data as analog signals.
Data link layer; framing; Impact of errors on digital data; Error detection, parity checks; Forward Error Correction, Hamming code
Flow control with stop-and-wait and sliding window; Error control with stop-and-wait ARQ, go-back-N ARQ and selective reject ARQ.
Need for multiplexing; Frequency Division Multiplexing; Time Division Multiplexing, including statistical TDM
Link and networking communications; Layers, protocol architectures and TCP/IP
Switching networks; Circuit switching; Virtual circuit packet switching; Datagram packet switching; Performance of switching techniques.
Routing requirements and metrics; Fixed routing and routing tables; Flooding; Adaptive routing; Routing protocol examples.
Classifying networks by size and users; LANs and WANs; general network topologies; Examples: ATM, PDH, SDH.
IEEE 802 architecture; Ethernet LANs; Switched LANs; IEEE 802.3 frames and addressing
The need for Internetworking; Internet Protocol (IP) and addressing; Structure of the Internet; Transport protocols; Application layer protocols.