Overview

Course Description: This course introduces the basics of networking, ranging from sending bits over wires to the Web and distributed computing. We focus on the internetworking ground between these two extremes, particularly focusing on the engineering of the Internet - goals, constraints, solutions, and experiences. The outcome of this course for you should be an appreciation of the fundamental challenges of networking, design strategies of proven value, and common implementation technologies. Topics will include: framing, error correction, packet switching, multi-access (Ethernet), addressing and forwarding (IP), distance vector and link state routing, queueing and scheduling, reliable transport, congestion control (TCP), quality of service, naming (DNS), software defined networks (SDN), and security. Familiarity with Java, python and Unix or Linux is required.

Class Times and Schedule: In-person attendance is required.

• 50804 - Tues/Thurs 09:30 AM - 11:00 AM @ ECJ 1.214
• Schedule: See Course Calendar.

Course Staff:

Name	Office Hours
Mikyung Han	Tues/Thurs 10:50 AM - 11:40 AM @ EER 1st floor lobby or by appointment
Shuozhe Li	Tue/Thurs 4 - 5 PM @ GDC 5.410A, Fri 4 - 5 PM via Zoom

Mail sent to cs326e-staff@cs.utexas.edu will reach all course staff. See more on Course Communication.

Textbooks: Lectures and readings will follow the Kurose book.

• Required: Computer Networking: a Top Down Approach. Kurose and Ross. 8th Edition. (Companion Site)
• Optional: Computer Networks. Tannenbaum, Feamster, and Wetherall. (Companion Site)
• Optional: Computer Networks: A Systems Approach. Peterson and Davie. [git repo]

Course Prerequisites: Students should have a familiarity with the subject matter in:

• Python
• Git
• Unix/Linux

 

Grading

Grading: Final grades will be decided by the following (Total 1000 pts).

• Participation: 10%
  • Pre-class/In-class activities (Total available 120 pts, max possible 100 pts - Note there is a 20 pts buffer)
• Programming Projects, Labs, and Experiments: 38%
  • 2 Projects: 180 pts
  • 2 Hands-on Experiment: 100 pts
  • 2 Labs: 100 pts
• Exams: 40%
• 2 Exams: 200 pts each
• Adjustments: Max {Exam1, Exam2} + Avg {Exam1, Exam2}
• Exercises: 12% (9 of them, 15 pts each - drop the lowest)

Letter grade assignments:

• 100-93%: A
• 92.99-90%: A-
• 89.99-87%: B+
• 86.99-83%: B
• 82.99-80%: B-
• 79.99-77%: C+
• 76.99-73%: C
• 72.99-70%: C-
• 69.99-67%: D+
• 66.99-63%: D
• 62.99-60.01%: D-
• 60-0%: F

Grading Disputes: Students are responsible for carefully inspecting all graded material. If you believe your work was graded incorrectly, you may submit a regrade request to the course staff. You must submit a regrade request to cs326e-staff@cs.utexas.edu within one week of the date the grade became available on Canvas. Your complaint must contain supporting evidence and arguments which explain why your work was graded incorrectly. (For example, it is not sufficient to submit a note that says ”regrade question 3”.) Grade change requests that do not meet these requirements will not be considered.

 

Late Work Policy

Slip Days: Each student will be given five slip days for submitting late for projects/labs/hands-on without penalty. Note slip days are for projects, labs, and hands-on assignments only. It cannot be used for any other types of assignments including EXs. A “day” means 24 hours from the original due date/time. You can use slip days toward check point deadline. You can NOT stack two or more slip days and use toward the same assignment. If used on a group project, then all students in a group loses one slip day. This also means in order to use a slip day on a group project, all members in the group must have at least one slip day left.

How to use a slip day: To use a late day, make a private post on Ed Discussion board under "Report Slip Day" section, stating your name (and your team member's name) and the name of the assignment. You must report the use of your slip day BEFORE the deadline.

Slip days are atomic: You cannot split up a late day and submit each of three assignments 8 hours late.

Late work (beyond the permitted slip days) will receive no credit!

 

Collaboration and Cheating

Collaboration is a very good thing. On the other hand, plagiarism or cheating is considered a very serious offense. Please don't do it! Concern about cheating creates an unpleasant environment for everyone. We will use technological means including Stanford Moss and other means to detect cheating.

 The principles of the collaboration policy are:

• Discussion is encouraged!
• We expect highly ethical behavior.
• Representing someone else's work as your own is unacceptable.
• Familiarize yourselves with the UT policies on academic integrity.
• If you have a question about what is allowed, ask!

Violating the collaboration policy may result in failing the class and/or other penalties. A baseline penalty is receiving a 0 on the assignment on which you cheated, a 1.0 (letter grade) deduction on your overall CS 326E grade, and a letter in your University file. The instructor has sole discretion to impose greater or lesser penalties than the baseline.

Group Work Policy: You are free to discuss the course material and all aspects of the group assignments with your teammates/partner, but teams are expected to make clear their division of labor for each aspect of the project. Students are expected to do individual work on their portion of the project.

Discussion within/without teams is permitted, indeed, encouraged! You can learn a lot from others; you can avoid getting stuck; and teaching someone else can be the best way to cement your own understanding. You may have discussions with anyone you like, including other CS 326E students following the rules and guidelins below.

Gillian's Island Rule This rule says that you are free to meet with fellow student(s) and discuss assignments with them. Writing on a board or shared piece of paper is acceptable during the meeting; however, you should not take any written (electronic or otherwise) record about the assignment away from the meeting. This applies when the assignment is supposed to be an individual effort or whenever two teams discuss common problems they are each encountering (inter-group collaboration). After the meeting, engage in a half hour of mind-numbing activity (like watching an episode of Gilligan's Island), before starting to work on the assignment. This will assure that you are able to reconstruct what you learned from the meeting, by yourself, using your own brain.

The Freedom of Information Rule: To assure that all interactions are on the level, you must always write the name(s) of who you talk with about your assignments on your assignment. These names should be listed in a prominent location at the top of the first page of your assignment. If it is a programming assignment, include this as part of the comment.

You must write up anything you submit on your own: Your code (which includes tests and documentation), problem answers, etc. must represent your own understanding, as explained solely by you, and your team members for the group assignments.

You may not view other people's code or solutions beyond your teammates: You may not share any of your own code (including, as always, tests and documentation) with others, including bringing it to a meeting with others.
You may not allow anyone except the course staff access to your assignment repositories or any other location where you keep CS 326E code. (If you need to copy code to your home computer, use Git. If anyone else has access to that computer, learn how to use your operating system's access control mechanism.) Don't post large amounts of your code (more than about 5 lines) to the forum.

As an exception to the prohibition against viewing another student's work, you are permitted to assist another student with tool-related problems (such as difficulty using IntelliJ or git), even if such assistance results in incidental viewing of snippets of code. But, regardless, each student is expected to write and debug the assignment code individually. Debugging your code is not a tool-related problem.

You may not represent someone else's work as your own: You must give credit where credit is due. When you turn in assignments, you must list everyone with whom you've had substantive discussions. Likewise, if you obtained a key idea from some other resource, such as a textbook or a website, then you should credit it.
You may not view and/or use any substantive material or solutions from similar assignments this term or previous terms at UW or elsewhere, including anywhere on the Internet, transcribing solutions from any other source, etc.

It's about your integrity, not just your CS 326E grade: Integrity is crucial to a working engineer. Computing is at the core of almost all societal systems, and its discrete nature makes it especially unforgiving. Software has been responsible for death and damage. If you cut corners in your work, or are unprepared for it, then you, too, could cause such problems. We expect you to show high ethical standards in CS 326E, and in the rest of your career. Accordingly, violation of academic honesty (for instance, by cheating or by collaboration beyond what is permitted) will be taken very seriously.

 

Course Communication

Canvas: We'll use Canvas for grading and course administration. Find the Canvas link here.

Ed Discussion forum: The CS 326E forums are for public discussions. You can access our Ed Discussion board via Canvas. We encourage all members of the class to help one another on the forums. If someone asks a question to which you know the answer, then please answer it. Helpful, friendly replies are appreciated and will contribute to the class participation part of your grade. If you are overwhelmed by the forum volume, you don't have to read all of the forum messages (the staff will disseminate any truly important information by email), but if you have trouble, are likely to find it helpful to read the forum. Please don't re-ask questions that have already been asked or answered there; search before you post. For technical questions, we encourage students to use real name as this often helps our course staff to track the problems, know better about you, and assist you faster. Finally, to help your classmates who are reading all the forum messages, please do not post content-free “noise” messages saying just “Thanks for the post” or “You're welcome” or “Me, too” — we have had complaints about them cluttering the forum. Thanks!

Staff mailing list: Mail sent to cs326e-staff@cs.utexas.edu will reach all course staff. In general, do not send mail to just one particular staff member, since that staff member may be busy, may not know the answer to your question, etc. You will get a quicker answer by contacting the entire staff. And, you may get an even quicker answer by using the forum, where both your classmates and the staff can also help you. As with any message, it is professional to use a descriptive subject line. Your question might be overlooked if you reply to an unrelated message or use a generic subject like “CS 326E Question”.

Anonymous mail: For non-technical issues, you can send a private message to either the whole staff or just the instructor on Ed Discussion (such when leaving feedback on course, etc.) Please feel free to use this if you have something on your mind and you prefer not to include your name to other students. Please be as constructive and specific as possible.

Mail to you: You are responsible for regularly checking (at least every 24 hours) your email officially registered with UT for class work and announcements.

Office Hours: Please visit the staff during office hours if you have anything you'd like to discuss about the course or course materials. If the office hours are not convenient, then send email to schedule an appointment. It is most helpful if you suggest several times when you are available.

How to Ask Questions

We want to help you by answering your questions! We would much rather that you ask us than that you waste your time in confusion and frustration. Here we suggest some ways to make your question more likely to elicit a useful answer. The two key points are to explain what you know and to explain what you have tried.

If you are having trouble with a tool or with code: Please be sure to include all the relevant information, and to be precise, so that others can help you. First, say what machine you are working on: the operating system, and whether it is a lab machine or your own personal computer. Then, state exactly what you did that caused the problem; this might be an action in a GUI or a command run from the command line. Also, state the exact outcome or output (not just “it gave an error”, for example), such as giving all the text from a popup message, or cut-and-pasting all the output from the command line. If your message is to the course staff, then commit your work to your Git repository and push to Github before you ask your question, so that the staff can reproduce the problem.  In case you want to include the output of terminal or textual output, please cut-and-paste the complete text and include it (rather than pasting the screenshots). The text is easier to read, is easy to make complete (unlike screenshots which may show only a portion of the output), and is searchable. Also, it can be helpful (to you and to others) to create the smallest possible test case that reproduces the problem. This helps to avoid being distracted by irrelevant details. You can proceed by binary search: cut away half of the input or the program at a time until you have isolated the problem. Even if you cannot do this, do still ask your question.

If you are having trouble with a concept: Please explain as much as you already understand. Saying “I don't understand anything about X” is unlikely to be true, and unlikely to be helpful in clearing up your confusion. For example, explicitly answering these questions can be a good place to start:

• What problem is being solved?
• Why is this an important problem?
• What is wrong with other approaches?
• Do you understand all the terminology?
• Where have you looked for the answer?

For any question: an excellent approach is to logically explain why your problem seems impossible. If your code is giving a wrong answer, then state a detailed logical argument about why the observed output is impossible. If you cannot understand a statement in the readings or in lecture, then state why it is a logical contradiction (or why it is not relevant, or what part of it just makes no sense). Also, be specific about what confuses you — for instance, give a page number. It's essential to say where you have already looked — in what books or handouts, what web search (Google is often smarter than the course staff and your friends), etc. Even if you do not discover your problem, this will help others to quickly understand the confusion — for example, perhaps you are misunderstanding a particular term, or you have forgotten to account for aliasing. And, it will prevent people from suggesting something you have already tried — such an answer delays you getting the help you want.

When NOT to ask questions? When you haven't tried to solve it yourself. You shouldn't ask a question until after you've at least tried to solve it yourself. As a general rule, that is actually good advice: sometimes you'll solve it on your own and, in any case, you can provide much better information about the problem. That information will make it much more likely that you quickly get a useful answer. Otherwise, someone might just suggest something you have already done, or might be confused about your problem.

When to ask questions? When you are stuck! It's great to make some headway on your problem before asking a question. But, stop when you are no longer making headway! If you get stuck, then stop wasting your time and get help from someone else. We definitely don't want you to waste your time in frustration, afraid to ask a question. Just explain what you know and what you have tried and ask the staff (or others) for help. Oftentimes there is a simple answer that can get you going again.

After your questions are answered: Finally, if you ask a question by email or in the forum and later discover the answer, then please let everybody know! This will help others, and will prevent anyone from wasting time continuing to answer a moot question.

 

Code of Conduct

The University of Texas Honor Code: The core values of The University of Texas at Austin are learning, discovery, freedom, leadership, individual opportunity, and responsibility. Each member of the University is expected to uphold these values through integrity, honesty, trust, fairness, and respect toward peers and community.

Professionalism: Professional conduct is expected in this course. Professional conduct is built upon the idea of mutual respect. Such conduct entails (but is not necessarily limited to):

• Attending class: The class benefits from the attendance and participation of all students. In person attendance is required. In case the lecture is provided via Zoom, plan to have your video on during class and be certain that your display name is your actual name (the one you use in person). However, we understand that there may be extenuating circumstances that prevent you from attending. Therefore, we will provide lecture recordings after the class. Note there will not be synchronous Zoom option during in-person class sessions. There will be a class participation grade.
• Arriving on time: Please do not hesitate to come to class, even if you are arriving late. I would rather you attend some of class, than miss out altogether. However, if you must arrive late or leave early, please be considerate of others.
• Minimizing disruptions (for Zoom): In case the lecture is provided via Zoom, please keep yourself on mute during lecture so as to make sure all can hear. During office hours and discussions, please keep mute turned off to allow for a more natural conversation---unless noise levels are high in your location. In this environment, some disruptions are unavoidabl. Please do not allow fear of disruptions to prevent you from attending.
• Respect: You should act respectfully toward all class participants.
• Appearance: Please arrive at class events clothed for both in-person and online meetings. You don't have to look great, but being covered is not optional.

Failure to follow the Code of Conduct may result in penalties ranging from being banned from office hours to dismissal from the course. Note that the Code of Conduct encompasses treatment of both fellow students and course staff.

 

Creating Welcoming Environment for All

Diversity and Inclusion: Professional courtesy and sensitivity are especially important with respect to individuals and topics dealing with differences of race, culture, religion, politics, gender, and nationalities. I ask that all students work with me to create a welcoming environment that is respectful of all forms of diversity, including diversity in race, gender, mental health, religion, ability, parenting status, and outside responsibilities.

Students with Disabilities: My policy is to fully support all students with disabilities to the best of my ability. At no time is it required that you disclose the nature of your disability to me, and I will not ask you to do so. If you are a student with a UT-acknowledged disability, I ask that you meet with me in person to discuss accommodations as soon as you have your accommodation letter in hand. I do ask that you meet with me by the 12th class day so that we can put your accommodations in place as soon as possible. If you are a student with a disability that has not yet been acknowledged by UT's Services for Students with Disabilities, I hope that you will be willing to disclose your status to me and I ask that you meet with me in person to develop a plan for your success this semester.
University-required language: The University of Texas at Austin provides upon request appropriate academic accommodations for qualified students with disabilities. For more information, contact the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, Services for Students with Disabilities at 471-6259, 471-4641 TTY.

Mental Health: We are going through a difficult season and I want you to know that you are not alone. There are many helpful resources available on campus. Learning how to ask for help is a sign of strength not weakness. If you or anyone you know experiences any academic stress, difficult life events, or feelings like anxiety or depression, we strongly encourage you to seek support. You may begin by talking to any of us, and we'll help you get connected to resources, or the Counseling and Mental Health Center is here to help you. http://www.cmhc.utexas.edu/individualcounseling.html

Religious Holidays: Religion (or lack there of) is an important part of who we are. If a holy day observed by your religion falls during the semester and you require accommodations due to that, please let me know as soon as possible. Email is an acceptable form of communication, though please use the format described above so I am more likely to receive it. If I do not indicate that I have received it, please do talk to me in person (virtually) or follow-up again in email. In order to guarantee accommodations around exams and other big deadlines, I will need notice of two weeks or more. If you are unable (or forget!) to provide that notice, please contact me anyway in case I can still accommodate you.
University-required language: A student who is absent from an examination or cannot meet an assignment deadline due to the observance of a religious holy day may take the exam on an alternate day or submit the assignment up to 24 hours late without penalty, if proper notice of the planned absence has been given. Notice must be given at least 14 days prior to the classes which will be missed. For religious holy days that fall within the first 2 weeks of the semester, notice should be given on the first day of the semester. Notice must be personally delivered to the instructor and signed and dated by the instructor, or sent certified mail. Email notification will be accepted if received, but a student submitting email notification must receive email confirmation from the instructor.

Harassment Reporting Requirements: Senate Bill 212 (SB 212), which went into effect as of January 1, 2020, is a Texas State Law that requires all employees (both faculty and staff) at a public or private post-secondary institution to promptly report any knowledge of any incidents of sexual assault, sexual harassment, dating violence, or stalking "committed by or against a person who was a student enrolled at or an employee of the institution at the time of the incident". Please note that the instructors and the TAs for this class are mandatory reporters and MUST share with the Title IX office any information about sexual harassment/assault shared with us by a student whether in-person or as part of a journal or other class assignment. Note that a report to the Title IX office does not obligate a victim to take any action, but this type of information CANNOT be kept strictly confidential except when shared with designated confidential employees. A confidential employee is someone a student can go to and talk about a Title IX matter without triggering that employee to have to report the situation to have it automatically investigated. If you would like to speak with someone who can provide support or remedies without making an official report to the university, please email advocate@austin.utexas.edu. For more information about reporting options and resources, visit http://www.titleix.utexas.edu/, contact the Title IX Office via email at titleix@austin.utexas.edu, or call 512-471-0419.

Emergency Situations: If you experience an emergency situation during the semester, Student Emergency Services is here to help you. They can help in the event of family emergencies, medical or mental health concerns, and interpersonal violence, among other situations. If you experience such an emergency, you may contact them directly through email (studentemergency@austin.utexas.edu) or by phone (512-471-5017), or you may contact one of us and we will assist you with the process.

 

Final Note

This syllabus is a plan of action for the semester. It is not a contract and is subject to change. As the instructor, I may make additions, deletions, and modifications to the syllabus and the course requirements with reasonable notification to the students enrolled in the course. You are responsible for any changes announced in class or on the course website.

Copyright Notice: These course materials, including, but not limited to, lecture notes, problem sets, and projects are part of upper division electives of Elements of Computing Certificate program. You must ask me permission to use these materials. This copyright extends to any and all video or audio recordings of this class. I do not grant to you the right to publish these materials for profit in any form.

Class Recordings: Class recordings are reserved only for students in this class for educational purposes and are protected under FERPA. The recordings should not be shared outside the class in any form. Violation of this restriction by a student could lead to Student Misconduct proceedings.

Credits: In the preparation of this course, I used materials from Lili Qiu, Ratul Mahajan, John Zahorjan, Katrina LaCurts, and textbook authors (James Kurose, Keith Ross, Andrew Tanenbaum, Nick Feamster, and David Wetherall). In building this syllabus, I borrowed languages and formats from Alison Norman, Sarah Abraham, Eric Rozner, Devangi Parikh, and Michael Ernst.

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Alison Norman, Devangi Parikh, Chand John, Sarah Abraham, Glen Downing, Lili Qiu, Don Fussell, Calvin Lin, and many other collegues for their valuable feedback, tips and tricks which helped me greatly build this course. Also I owe Doug Robers, the amazing helpreq/preq team, and all other staff members a debt of gratitude for their strong and timely support. Thank YOU ALL!