Course Description
ECE 3650 Local Area Networks and Internetworking: Presents fundamental principles and practical aspects concerned with the design and analysis of Local Area Networks (LANs) and Internetworking strategies. Networks can be classified by numerous criteria. Properties including size, transmission speed, ownership and applications play an important role in understanding design and implementation decisions. The traditional definition of a LAN is that it provides relatively high-speed transmission within a limited geographic scope, and ownership is associated with the organization that uses and manages it. An alternative definition is that a LAN provides the physical and link-layer access point to an internetwork. LAN technology provides electrical, physical and signaling specifications, as well as the rules for transmission on various shared or dedicated media. Today LANs can operate at speeds in the Gigabits-per-second and may span great distances. Internetworking imposes a higher logical-layer abstraction that provides the protocols, algorithms and devices for interconnecting a mesh of heterogeneous LANs and intermediate networks into an internet. Thus, providing the means for a process running on a device connected to one LAN to communicate with a process on another device connected to a remote LAN. The objective of this course is to guide students through the evolution of LAN technology, from the challenges addressed by engineers designing first and second generation LANs, to present and future advances. The course emphasizes basic algorithms and protocols used for media access control and performance evaluation. Throughout the course internetworking concepts will be discussed and related to the protocols used in the present day Internet. Prerequisite: ECE 3511 or equivalent. Recommended: ECE 3351.
Possible Text Books