Principles of Data Communications Networks - 605.671

This course provides an introduction to the field of data communications and computer networks. It covers the principles of data communications, the fundamentals of signaling, basic transmission concepts, transmission media, circuit control, line sharing techniques, physical and data link layer protocols, error detection and correction, data compression, network security techniques and protocols, common carrier services and data networks, the mathematical techniques used for network design and performance analysis, Ethernet and Wi-Fi local area networks, and the TCP/IP-based Internet. Potential topics include analog and digital signaling; data encoding and modulation; Shannon channel capacity; synchronous and asynchronously transmission; RS232 physical layer interface standards; FDM, TDM, and STDM multiplexing techniques; inverse multiplexing; analog and digital transmission; V series modem standards; PCM encoding and T1 transmission circuits; LRC, VRC, and CRC error detection techniques; Hamming and Viterbi forward error correction techniques; character and bit-oriented protocols, information transparency, and BSC and HDLC data link layer protocols; Huffman, MNP5, and Lempel-Ziv-Welch data compression algorithms; circuit, message, packet, and cell switching techniques; public key and symmetric encryption algorithms, authentication, digital signature, and message digest techniques, secure e-mail, PGP, TLS/SSL, Kerberos, and IPsec security algorithms; reliability, availability, and queuing analysis performance techniques; Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet LANs; Wi-Fi 4, Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi 6, and Wi-Fi 7 LANs; IPv4 and IPv6 network layer protocols, RIP, OSPF, and BGP4 routing protocols; and TCP and UDP transport layer protocols.