TTMG 5002 T: Telecommunications Technology (Fall 2007)

Latebreaking News

The final grades have been submitted electronically and seemed to have been approved by the relevant authorities.

In the Fall 2007 term, Thomas Kunz was teaching TTMG 5002 T, Telecommunications Technoloy. The online calendar description can be found here. This page contains some information about the course and links to additional resources available to the class, either provided by the instructor or existing in the Internet. To find out more about the format of documents made available on this course webpage, read the comments on this page.

Reading papers, preparing presentations: the course will require you to (among other things) read papers, and engage in a course project, training your research skills. To prepare for these tasks, you should consult a number of online references on how to go about this (preparing a GOOD presentation or project report takes substantial effort):

A short sequence of PPT transparencies from Nitin Vaidya on how to read, write, and present papers (postscript or HTML document).
Another useful reference is the website Advice on Research and Writing and the Graduate Study in the Computer and Mathematical Sciences: A Survival Manual website.
On the other hand, avoid the pitfalls identied in How to Have a Bad Career in Research/Academia.
A (tongue-in-cheek) dictionary of "useful" research phrases.
A lengthy but very interesting talk by Richard Hamming on what it takes to be a great researcher.
An interesting editorial on what higher education should be about.

Plagiarism is unfortunately a not too infrequent problem in academia. I expect all submissions to clearly identify what sources/references have been used for what part of your submission. If you are unsure as to what constitutes plagiarism, please check this website.

Course Handout (and during the term Assignments/Other Material):

Official Course Handout as PDF file or as HTML document

Interesting Reading Material (password-protected). Note that I don't expect you to read/know these papers (except for those that are part of an assignment), but they are interesting and provide additional insight to the various aspects of the material we discuss in class.

Shannon's original paper on Communication in the Presence of Noise.
An interesting article on the Origins of the Sampling Theorem. This article demonstrates how practicians, theoreticians, and mathematicians discovered the implications of the sampling theorem almost independent of one another.
An article explaining core telecommunications technology terminology: Bits, Symbols, Baud, and Bandwidth
Reading material for Assignment 2:

The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols, David Clark, Proceedings, SIGCOMM '88 Symposium, August 1988.
End-to-End Arguments in System Design, J Saltzer, D Reed, D Clark, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, November 1984.
Rethinking the Design of the Internet: The End-to-end arguments vs. the Brave New World, M. Blumenthal, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology August 2001.

Article for Assignment 3 (Public vs. Private Interest on the Internet)
A study of CRC and Checksum Performance over Real Data
A paper on the performance of HDLC
Local Area Networks: ATM
Limits to Low Latency in High-Speed LANs
A tutorial on SS7 (Signaling System #7)
Congestion Management Myths in High-Speed Networks
A set of practical exercises to better understand IP and LAN, by Gorry Fairhurst - Department of Engineering, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.
Security-related links:

In many communication protocol description (in particular for security protocols), the communicating partners are called Alice and Bob. In the textbook they are, for example, used to describe how to send e-mail... Wikipedia has an entry for a whole list of characters traditionally used. In cryptography, Alice and Bob have been psycho-analyzed as well.
Asymmetric key cryptography: we only discusses the "classic" RSA algorithm. But there is a Canadian company, Certicom, that has developed an alternative (and much more efficient) asymmetric key approach.
A funny description of how to design an Authentication System (lead to the Kerberos system)
Good security algorithms are notoriously hard to design. Often some weaknesses are exposed sooner or later, see for example the weaknesses in MD5 and SHA-1, both widely used in authentication protocols.
Known weaknesses of WEP, and a software packet to exploit those: AirSnort
A newer paper (2007), describing how to break WEP in under 60 seconds, and the corresponding software to make it happen.

The original paper describing the Chord Peer-to-Peer System

Course slides are available from the MyCarleton portal under Files. You can log on using your connect userid and password. The slides will be posted as they become available, but hopefully in all cases before the actual lecture. Until registration is sorted out, I will also post the material here (password-protected).

Additional slides on Channels and Shannon/Information Theory