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How Networks Work, Freed & Derfler, Que, Paperback, 6th edition, Published October 2002, 233 pages, ISBN 0789727536

While this is something of a comic book, it is a starting point if you don't know much about networks. It was also within the PEP program's cost guidelines J

There are many excellent texts on networking. The most commonly cited is Andrew Tanenbaum's Computer Networks, 4^th edition, 2003, 891 pages, ISBN 0-13-066102-3. Another excellent book is William Stalling's Data and Computer Communications, 7^th edition, published May 2003, 864 pages, ISBN 0-13-100681-9.

http://jcs.mil/htdocs/teinfo/network1/network.htm Links page for NCW info

http://www.dodccrp.org/ Department of Defense NCW homepage

http://www.usni.org/Proceedings/Articles98/PROcebrowski.htm Paper by Admiral Cebrowski

http://www.dtic.mil/jcs/j6/education/warfare.html Overview of NCW

http://www.solipsys.com/ NCS company that Raytheon has acquired

http://authors.phptr.com/tanenbaumcn4/ Website for Tanenbaum's 4^th edition of Computer Networks.

http://www.silkroad.com/net-history.html History of networking timeline

http://www.hsdataline.co.uk/history_of_networking.htm A condensed overview of computer networks

http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/ An Internet history links page

http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/ Computer, Internet, and telecommunications history

http://www.zytrax.com/tech/ A great site for technical info on networks.

Note: I will award a gorgeous, new, National Instruments Lab Windows/CVI 100% cotton tee-shirt to the best submitted set of answers! What a deal! Get started now, there may be some stiff competition! Hint - most are taken from or are adaptations of problems in the Tannenbaum book. You might check out the zytrax tech pages for help on some of these. Or read the class text. Or ask me for help J

1. Imagine that you've trained your dog, Bernie, to carry a box of three DVD disks instead of a flask of brandy. (When your hard drive fills up, consider that an emergency.) The DVD's each contain 5 gigabytes. The dog can travel to your side wherever you may be, at 18 km/hour. For what range of distances does Bernie have a higher data rate than a transmission line whose data rate (excluding overhead) is 150 Mbps?
2. A client-server system uses a satellite network, with the satellite at a height of 40,000 km. What is the best-case delay in response to a request?
3. What is the principal difference between connectionless communication and connection-oriented communication?
4. The Internet is roughly doubling in size every 18 months. Although no one really knows for sure, one estimate put the number of hosts on it at 100 million in 2001. Use these data to compute the expected number of Internet hosts in the year 2010. Do you really believe this? Explain why or why not?
5. Wireless networks are easy to install, which makes them inexpensive since installation costs usually far outshadow equipment costs. Nevertheless, they also have some disadvantages. Name two of them.
6. Make a list of activities that you do every day in which computer networks are used. How would your life be altered if these networks were suddenly switched off?
7. The ping program allows you to send a test packet to a given location a see how long it takes to get there and back. Try using ping to see how long it takes to get from your location to several known locations. From these data, plot the one-way transit time over the Internet as a function of distance. It is best to use universities since the location of their servers is known very accurately. For example, berkeley.edu is in Berkeley, California, mit.edu is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, vu.nl is in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, www.usyd.edu.au is in Sydney, Australia, and www.uct.ac.za is in Cape Town, South Africa. You will have to try this from outside the company firewall.
8. An image from RVS' latest multicolor detector is 1024 x 768 pixels with 3 bytes/pixel. Assume the image is uncompressed. How long does it take to transmit it over a 56 kbps modem channel? Over a 1 Mbps cable modem? Over a 10 Mbps Ethernet? Over 100 Mbps Ethernet?
9. A 100 km long cable runs at the T1 data rate. The propagation speed in the cable is 2/3 the speed of light in vacuum. How many bits fit in the cable?
10. Convert the IP address whose hexadecimal representation is C22F1582 to dotted decimal notation. What class is the address?