Welcome to the home page for ECE2305 "Introduction to Communications and Networking" for D-term 2014.

announcements and lecture slides

general

The required course textbook is Data and Computer Communications, 10th edition, by William Stallings.

The course syllabus (pdf format) including expected course outcomes, grading information, and late policies.

ECE2305 academic honesty policies.

ECE2305 students with disabilities statement.

homework and lab assignments

homework and lab assignment 1

Homework and lab assignment 1. Due promptly at the start of class 25-Mar.

Solution.

homework and lab assignment 2

Homework and lab assignment 2. Due promptly at the start of class 01-Apr.

For question 3 and questions 18-20, the DNS servers you select may refuse your DNS query (I had trouble getting this to work). If you are having problems with question 2, you can query the DNS server for another university in Asia (rather than a Yahoo mail server) but still specify the server from question 2. For questions 18-20, it seems that bitsy.mit.edu will refuse the request. You can use 8.8.8.8 (the Google Public DNS) or 208.67.222.222 (OpenDNS Public DNS) for these questions.

For parts II and III (ipconfig and Wireshark), I recommend you do this part on a Windows or Linux computer. Determining the DNS configuration and flushing the DNS cache is tricky in OS X. OS X has its own way of doing address resolution and will probably be easier to just do these parts of the assignment on a Windows PC.

Homework solution.

Lab solution.

homework and lab assignment 3

Homework and lab assignment 3. Due promptly at the start of class 08-Apr.

For question 5 in the lab assignment, the response I got from the server did not have a http.last_modified field. You can, however, filter by http.last_modified in the Wireshark filter and probably find another HTTP response that has this field. Please be sure to discuss what you did in your lab report.

For questions 8-11 of the lab assignment, I was unable to observe the "conditional get" when loading lab3part2.html. I'm not sure why this is (it might be because the html file is very small). If you are having the same problem, you can try http://spinlab.wpi.edu/wireshark/alice.txt. You should see at least one "HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified" response in this case. The point of this part of the assignment is to see that the web server doesn't send the whole file again if you request it shortly after you first requested it. The web server sends a much shorter "not modified" message that allows the browser to use the local cache instead.

Homework solution.

Lab solution.

homework and lab assignment 4

Homework and lab assignment 4. Due promptly at the start of class 15-Apr.

Homework solution.

Lab solution.

homework and lab assignment 5

Homework and lab assignment 5. Due promptly at the start of class 22-Apr.

Homework solution.

Lab solution.

homework and lab assignment 6

Homework and lab assignment 6. Due promptly at the start of class 29-Apr.

Homework solution.

Lab solution.

quizzes

quiz 1

Quiz 1 is scheduled for Thursday 27-Mar. Quiz 1 solution.

quiz 2

Quiz 2 is scheduled for Thursday 03-Apr. Quiz 2 solution.

quiz 3

Quiz 3 is scheduled for Thursday 10-Apr. Quiz 3 solution.

quiz 4

Quiz 4 is scheduled for Thursday 17-Apr. Quiz 4 solution.

quiz 5

Quiz 5 is scheduled for Thursday 01-May. Quiz 5 solution.

quiz 6

Quiz 6 is scheduled for Tuesday 06-May. Quiz 6 solution.