Description
This course is a rigorous introduction to digital communication networks from a liberal-arts perspective. The main question that we will address is how information of all kinds can be transmitted efficiently, between two points at a distance, in such a way that very little assumption need be made about the physical mode of transport and how the route the information travels need not be known in advance. We emphasize the importance of abstraction and the use of redundancy to establish errorfree transmission even in the face of significant noise. We study protocol stacks from the application layer (canonical example: web browser) down to the physical transmission medium. We analyze how high-level information (for instance, a message including an image attachment being sent via email) is translated to bits, broken into discrete packets, sent independently using the basic building blocks of the Internet—and then how those packets are reassembled, seemingly instantaneously, in the correct o