Lesson 1: Introduction, History, and Internet Architecture

• What are the advantages and disadvantages of a layered architecture?

• What are the differences and similarities between the OSI model and the five-layered Internet model?

• What are sockets?

• Describe each layer of the OSI model.

• Provide examples of popular protocols at each layer of the five-layered Internet model.

• What is encapsulation, and how is it used in a layered model?

• What is the end-to-end (e2e) principle?

• What are the examples of a violation of e2e principle?

• What is the EvoArch model?

• Explain a round in the EvoArch model.

• What are the ramifications of the hourglass shape of the internet?

• Repeaters, hubs, bridges, and routers operate on which layers?

• What is a bridge, and how does it “learn”?

• What is a distributed algorithm?

• Explain the Spanning Tree Algorithm.

• What is the purpose of the Spanning Tree Algorithm?

Lesson 2: Transport and Application Layers

• What does the transport layer provide?

• What is a packet for the transport layer called?

• What are the two main protocols within the transport layer?

• What is multiplexing, and why is it necessary?

• Describe the two types of multiplexing/demultiplexing.

• What are the differences between UDP and TCP?

• When would an application layer protocol choose UDP over TCP?

• Explain the TCP Three-way Handshake.

• Explain the TCP connection tear down.

• What is Automatic Repeat Request or ARQ?

• What is Stop and Wait ARQ?

• What is Go-back-N?

• What is selective ACKing?

• What is fast retransmit?

• What is transmission control, and why do we need to control it?

• What is flow control, and why do we need to control it?

• What is congestion control?

• What are the goals of congestion control?

• What is network-assisted congestion control?

• What is end-to-end congestion control?

• How does a host infer congestion?

• How does a TCP sender limit the sending rate?

• Explain Additive Increase/Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) in the context of TCP.

• What is a slow start in TCP?

• Is TCP fair in the case where connections have the same RTT? Explain.

• Is TCP fair in the case where two connections have different RTTs? Explain.

• Explain how TCP CUBIC works.

• Explain TCP throughput calculation.

Lesson 3: Intradomain Routing

• What is the difference between forwarding and routing?

• What is the main idea behind a link-state routing algorithm?

• What is an example of a link-state routing algorithm?

• Walk through an example of the link-state routing algorithm.

• What is the computational complexity of the link-state routing algorithm?

• What is the main idea behind the distance vector routing algorithm?

• Walk through an example of the distance vector algorithm.

• When does the count-to-infinity problem occur in the distance vector algorithm?

• How does poison reverse solve the count-to-infinity problem?

• What is the Routing Information Protocol (RIP)?

• What is the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol?

• How does a router process advertisements?

• What is hot potato routing?

Lesson 4: AS Relationships and Interdomain Routing

• Describe the relationships between ISPs, IXPs, and CDNs.

• What is an AS?

• What kind of relationship does AS have with other parties?

• What is BGP?

• How does an AS determine what rules to import/export?

• What were the original design goals of BGP? What was considered later?

• What are the basics of BGP?

• What is the difference between iBGP and eBGP?

• What is the difference between iBGP and IGP-like protocols (RIP or OSPF)?

• How does a router use the BGP decision process to choose which routes to import?

• What are the 2 main challenges with BGP? Why?

• What is an IXP?

• What are four reasons for IXP’s increased popularity?

• Which services do IXPs provide?

• How does a route server work? ``

Lesson 5: Router Design and Algorithms (Part 1)

• What are the basic components of a router?

• Explain the forwarding (or switching) function of a router.

• The switching fabric moves the packets from input to output ports. What are the functionalities performed by the input and output ports?

• What is the purpose of the router’s control plane?

• What tasks occur in a router?

• List and briefly describe each type of switching. Which, if any, can send multiple packets across the fabric in parallel?

• What are two fundamental problems involving routers, and what causes these problems?

• What are the bottlenecks that routers face, and why do they occur?

• Convert between different prefix notations (dot-decimal, slash, and masking).

• What is CIDR, and why was it introduced?

• Name 4 takeaway observations around network traffic characteristics. Explain their consequences.

• Why do we need multibit tries?

• What is prefix expansion, and why is it needed?

• Perform a prefix lookup given a list of pointers for unibit tries, fixed-length multibit ties, and variable-length multibit tries.

• Perform a prefix expansion. How many prefix lengths do old prefixes have? What about new prefixes?

• What are the benefits of variable-stride versus fixed-stride multibit tries?

Lesson 6: Router Design and Algorithms (Part 2)

• Why is packet classification needed?

• What are three established variants of packet classification?

• What are the simple solutions to the packet classification problem?

• How does fast searching using set-pruning tries work?

• What’s the main problem with the set pruning tries?

• What is the difference between the pruning approach and the backtracking approach for packet classification with a trie?

• What’s the benefit of a grid of tries approach?

• Describe the “Take the Ticket” algorithm.

• What is the head-of-line problem?

• How is the head-of-line problem avoided using the knockout scheme?

• How is the head-of-line problem avoided using parallel iterative matching?

• Describe FIFO with tail drop.

• What are the reasons for making scheduling decisions more complex than FIFO?

• Describe Bit-by-bit Round Robin scheduling.

• Bit-by-bit Round Robin provides fairness; what’s the problem with this method?

• Describe Deficit Round Robin (DRR).

• What is a token bucket shaping?

• In traffic scheduling, what is the difference between policing and shaping?

• How is a leaky bucket used for traffic policing and shaping?