Within the area of computer networks, participants successfully completing the course are expected to be able to:

• Explain, describe, and analyze a typical network architecture, including arguing regarding the importance of network layers and encapsulation
• Explain the different basic types of protocols, communication channels, and network types
• Design, implement, verify, and test your own protocols
• Explain fundamental performance tradeoffs, including showing an understanding of where delays can occur in a network, what different types of delay that exist, the impact of packet losses and jitter on various protocols
• Using concrete examples, and in detail, describe the interaction between the different protocols in the network architecture, and the protocols associated with the different layers
• Describe and analyze the most common application architectures in the Internet, how the most important application-layer protocols work, the service they provide, as well as have the ability to design and implement their own application-layer protocols
• Analyze and explain important design considerations at the transport layer, including hands-on knowledge of how flow control and congestion control works, and how reliable data transfer is implemented
• Motivate and explain how routing and forwarding is implemented on the Internet, including basic design and implementation principles of network-layer protocols used to ensure scalability
• Describe and explain different link-layer technologies and how they work
• Exemplify how different types of security services can be implemented in different layers with the help of different standards
• Analyze and exemplify some of the unique challenges as we are moving towards increasingly mobile users
• Explain and discuss the fundamentals of how multimedia services are provided over the Internet

• Define what a distributed system is and its most important goals
• Explain the relationship between architectures, processes and communication
• Exemplify different types of transparency, scaling techniques
• Analyze and explain some of the fundamental differences in different system architectures
• Describe and explain how to achieve synchronization, consistency and replication
• Implement, motivate, and explain the design of various types if distributed system architectures, including object-based distributed systems (e.g., using Corba) and Web-based distributed systems (including how a proxy cache works)
• Understand fundamental homogeneous and heterogeneous multicore architecture concepts and their performance implications; basic techniques for multicore programming with threads and tasks; and some techniques to design parallel algorithms and analyze their complexity, including parallel scalability
• Understand system-level methods and tools for the design of real-time embedded systems; understand basic tradeoffs and design implications that need to be taken into consideration when making system-level design decisions; and place the design in a bigger context (including in the context of the hardware architecture and software implementation).

• Explain using concrete examples fundamental network design principles and scalability tradeoffs
• Design and perform targeted experiments to critically evaluate network and distributed systems technologies
• Apply basic system models and analysis methods to analyze systems and networks
• As a team, plan and conduct a project study of an identified problem within a selected technology area, including experiments using real data sources (in some cases collected by the students themselves)
• Based on a project study, present and explain (both written and orally) findings within a selected area of technology, to an audience with similar general knowledge of computer networks
• Give/receive constructive feedback to/from other students