Courses Comer Teaches At Purdue University
I teach courses in the areas of operating systems, networking,
internetworking, distributed systems, and software design.
In addition to regular courses, I offer seminars in new research
areas.
Recent seminars include: ATM and high-speed networking as well as wireless
mobile internetworking.
Examples of Comer Courses
CS 636: Internetworking
This is a graduate-level course in internetwork design and
architecture. It covers addressing, binding, routing, internet and
application protocols, principles, and architecture of the global
Internet. The focus is on the TCP/IP Internet Protocol Suite. The
goals are:
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To acquaint students with major internet protocols, their features,
details, and functionality,
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To introduce students to the literature, and
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To show students principles and abstractions underlying design choices and
the consequent tradeoffs.
Students will solve homework problems, read RFCs and other pertinent
literature, and create a large complex computer program (usually, the
semester assignment is to construct an IP router, including datagram
fragmentation, reassembly, routing, and ICMP error handling).
Students are given access to a processor with interfaces on three networks.
The lab is attached to the global Internet.
Schedule
The following is a tentative outline of topics for the course. Some
topics may take less time than allocated; others may take more. We will
move rapidly through material that is covered in the text, spending class
time on subtleties and current research issues. To some extent, speed will
depend on the maturity and background of the class.
- 1 Introduction to internetworking. Basic networking concepts. Review
of network hardware. Example networks including local and wide
area networks (e.g., Ethernet and NSFnet/ANSNET backbones).
Packet types and packet decoding.
- 2 Internet concept. The TCP/IP Internet abstraction and architectural
model. Internet addressing. Need for binding IP addresses.
Dynamic binding and ARP protocol.
- 3 Datagram concept and datagram format. Datagram (IP) routing.
IP Connectionless delivery service.
- 4 Error messages and error handling. ICMP protocol. Specifics of
ICMP messages
- 5 Routers and datagram processing. Time-to-live. Datagram addresses
and route destinations. Host-specific routes. Default (wildcard) routes.
- 6 Protocol layering. Purpose. Internet reference model.
- 7 Transport protocols. User datagram protocol (UDP) and protocol
port numbers.
- 8 Reliable stream delivery service (TCP). Flow control, windowing,
acknowledgments. Three-way handshake. Protocol state diagram.
- 9 Vector-distance and link-status routing algorithms.
Route propagation.
Core and non-core internet routing architecture.
Example of vector-distance protocols.
- 10 Autonomous systems concept. Reachability advertisement, EGP
protocol. Weaknesses and alternatives. Path routing and BGP.
- 11 Interior gateway protocols (e.g., RIP, HELLO, OSPF). Metric
manipulation.
- 12 Client-server model for applications. Examples. Domain name
system (DNS).
- 13 Other application-level services including: electronic mail (SMTP),
file transfer (FTP and TFTP), remote login (TELENT and rlogin).
- 14 Network management (SNMP, ASN.1)
- 15 New research problems or topics.
CS 590N: Internetworking Lite
This is a 500-level version of CS 636 that shares lectures, but does not
include the router project.
Instead, students write several smaller programs that do not require
extensive operating systems background.