This page states some of the assumed knowledge for readers of the NOC wiki.
Creating a new page for each background concept would excessively increase the number of pages in the wiki. Instead, background concepts can be grouped on pages for the courses in which those concepts would usually be taught. Use UNSW courses as a guide as to which concepts should be grouped together.
Network technologies[]
e.g. courses that use textbooks by Tanenbaum & Wetherall, Kurose & Ross, or Peterson & Davie, e.g. UNSW TELE3118
Protocols are listed in the layer that they usually control, rather than the layer in which they operate. eg. DHCP and routing protocols control network layer IP addresses and paths, so are listed as part of the network layer, even if they are usually implemented as application layer protocols that operate over a transport protocol such as TCP or UDP.
Topics that span layers[]
Network layering: Physical Layer, Link Layer, Network Layer, Transport Layer, Application Layer, OSI Reference Model
protocol, PDU, packet, frame , segment, fragmentation and reassembly
demultiplexing identifiers, Ethertype, IP protocol, port number, PDU, segmentation and reassembly, header decoding
octet[]
An octet is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that consists of eight bits. The term is often used when the term byte might be ambigous, as there is no standard for the size of the byte
Standards? e.g. backwards compatibility
Network standards organisations: IEEE 802, IETF Requests For Comments (RFCs), OSI, ITU
- IETF: The Internet Eginneering Task Force (IETF) develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the Internet protocol suite. It is an open standards organization, with no formal membership or membership requirements.[1]
Network devices: host, interface - IP, interface - network interface card?, links, routers, switches, hub, server
topology of a network
Equipment manufacturers: Cisco, HP, Huawei
Addressing, e.g. Link-Local addresses, MAC addresses, IP addresses, unicast, broadcast, multicast
error control coding / Hamming distance / ARQ / retransmission / acknowledgements
Physical layer[]
cables - UTP Physics:
impedance mismatch, change of refractive index
codeword
Link layer[]
Medium Access Control (MAC)
MAC protocols: Ethernet, Token ring;
Ethernet: frame length requirements, preamble, SFD, CRC
bridges/switches Spanning Tree Protocol
packet capture / promiscuous mode Local network monitoring (sniffing)  As opposed to Remote Network Monitoring e.g. by using Wiresharkor packet capture libraries Further reading In Wikipedia: Packet capture Packet analyzer Wireshark
VLAN
Address Resolution Protocol ARP
ARP
Network layer[]
ICMP
Internet Protocol, IPv4, IPv6, TTL
IPX
duplicate IP addresses
Link-local Address A link-local address is an Internet Protocol address that is intended only for communications within the segment of a local network (a link) or a point-to-point connection that a host is connected to. Routers do not forward packets with link-local addresses. routing protocols, Link-State routing, Distance-Vector routing
source routing
EGP
ping
traceroute
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)
Transport layer[]
[In Australian network management, TCP also refers to Telecommunications Consumer Protection for which a code of conduct was issued in 2008 and revised before being issued in 2012 ]
DCCP, SCTP, TLS
Sockets programming API[]
htons()
Application layer[]
HTTP, SMTP, worm, RPC
web browser
Network security[]
e.g. UNSW TELE3119
Not assumed, but would enhance understanding of some aspects of this course
Transport Layer Security
cryptography / encryption
key - cryptographic
Denial Of Service (DOS) attacks
Computing[]
booting,
coldStart, warmStart
durable and volatile memory
2s-complement arithmetic
NULL termination of strings
e.g. data types, e.g. signed and unsigned integers, enumerated types
interrupts vs polling
mutual exclusion - concurrency - threads etc - atomic operations
Mathematics[]
Matrix manipulation
Engineering[]
hysteresis
reliability: MTTF etc
Unsorted[]
UDP[]
IP Address , Subnet Mask , RFC
Link-state routing, distance-vector routing
Address Resolution Protocol(ARP) is a telecommunications protocol used for resolution of network layer addresses into link layer addresses, a critical function in multiple-access networks. Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) exists solely to glue together the IP and Ethernet networking layers. Since networking hardware such as switches, hubs, and bridges operate on Ethernet frames, they are unaware of the higher layer data carried by these frames . Similarly, IP layer devices, operating on IP packets need to be able to transmit their IP data on Ethernets. ARP defines the conversation by which IP capable hosts can exchange mappings of their Ethernet and IP addressing.
1-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Resolution_Protocol2-http://linux-ip.net/html/ether-arp.html