Required Text: Larry L. Peterson and Bruce S. Davie, Computer Networks: A Systems Approach, Morgan Kaufmann; 5th ed. (20 April 2011, ISBN 978-0123850591) or 4th ed. (16 April 2007, ISBN 978-0123705488).
Optional Text: Jerome Saltzer and M. Frans Kaashoek, Principles of Computer System Design: An Introduction, Part I (Chapters 1-6), Version 5.0, paperback, published in UK by Elsevier, ISBN 978-0-12-374957-4.
Required Text: Jerome Saltzer and M. Frans Kaashoek, Principles of Computer System Design: An Introduction, Part II (Chapters 7-11), Version 5.0, PDF available free online
Required Text: Penfield, Information and Entropy (Lecture Notes), PDF available free online
Readings for 3035/GZ01 are principally drawn from the two textbooks above: Peterson and Davie (referred to as P & D in the class calendar), and Saltzer and Kaashoek (referred to as S & K in the class calendar). Note that S & K is divided into two parts, the first of which is only available as a commercially produced book, and the second of which is available free online in PDF (provided directly by the authors). Readings are drawn from both parts of S & K.
The UCL Library holds copies of both P & D and S & K. Waterstone's on Torrington Place and amazon.co.uk sell both books.
One required reading for BGP consists of lecture notes from an MIT graduate course on networking:
Feamster, Nick and Balakrishnan, Hari, 6.829 Lecture 4: Inter-Domain Routing.This reading is available in hardcopy only, and will be handed out in lecture approximately a week before it is assigned.
While the Internet (often) works well today, the protocols that comprise it solve problems that were once difficult research questions. Describing the Internet purely declaratively ("these are the bits in an IP header; these are the steps TCP takes") is boring and unenlightening--it does not reveal fundamental networking problems, nor the sophisticated algorithmic ideas underlying network protocols, nor why these protocols must be as they are to work (or at least why many alternative designs don't work).
To convey the problems networked systems must solve and the "why" of the designs that solve these problems, we assign several "classic" networking research papers as required readings for 3035/GZ01. These papers, shown as readings on the class calendar, are:
Metcalfe, R., Boggs, D., Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks, Communications of the ACM 19(7), July 1976.
Degermark, M., Brodnik, A., Carlsson, S., and Pink, S., Small Forwarding Tables for Fast Routing Lookups, in SIGCOMM 1997.
Jacobson, V. and Karels, M., Congestion Avoidance and Control, revised version of original paper in SIGCOMM 1988.
Saltzer, J., Reed, D., and Clark, D., End-to-End Arguments in System Design, in ACM TOCS, 2(4), November, 1984.