Network Architecture

Communication networks, digital and analog data, signaling, and transmission concepts. Establishes the vocabulary needed to understand how network information is represented and carried.

Layered protocol architecture, TCP/IP, the OSI reference model, and internetworking. Explains how layered designs organize communication functions and allow different systems to work together.

TCP and UDP transport, IP and IPv6, TCP segments, checksums, and protocol options. Connects packet and segment structures with the delivery services applications depend on.

Packet-switching principles, routing, X.25, Frame Relay architecture, user data transfer, and call control. Provides historical context for wide-area networking and the evolution toward cell- and packet-based services.

ATM protocol architecture, logical connections, fixed-size cells, service categories, and the ATM Adaptation Layer. Explains how ATM organizes traffic and adapts higher-layer services to a cell-based network.

Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and high-speed wireless LAN technologies. Relates increased local-network speed to the needs of server farms, workgroups, and backbone connections.

Network capacity, queueing, saturation, packet delay, and approaches to preventing congestion. Examines why performance deteriorates as demand approaches capacity and how control mechanisms respond.

Link-control mechanisms, flow control, error control, and Automatic Repeat Request performance. Connects data-link reliability and transmission control with network performance.

TCP flow and congestion control, sliding windows, credit allocation, and TCP performance over ATM. Explains how TCP regulates the amount of data in flight and responds to network conditions.

ATM traffic management, buffer overflow, real-time traffic, and service-specific congestion-control requirements. Discusses why small cells, high transmission speeds, and mixed application demands require specialized controls.

Representing networks as graphs, vertices and edges, adjacency matrices, and shortest-path foundations for routing. Builds the mathematical background needed to analyze network topology and choose routes.

Routing within an internetwork, topology information, least-cost decisions, and fixed and adaptive routing concepts. Explains how routers use information about topology and link conditions to make forwarding decisions.

Routing across autonomous systems, path-vector routing, Border Gateway Protocol, and multicast concepts. Connects routing policy between networks with the requirements of delivering traffic to groups.

Quality of service for elastic and real-time traffic, resource reservation, and traffic classification. Compares reserving resources for traffic demands with classifying and handling groups of traffic differently.

QoS requirements, resource reservation for unicast and multicast, soft state, and support for streaming traffic. Shows how reservation and related protocol functions support applications with timing and delivery requirements.