Masters Programme in Advanced Computer Science

• Objectives
• Prerequisites
• Syllabus
• Assessment
• Recommended Reading
• 2007/08 course information

Course objectives

The increasing importance and usage of the Internet for commercial, educational, academic, governmental, and entertainment purposes imposes strong requirements in terms of low failure rate, high availability, sufficient quality etc. onto all Internet services, protocols and distributed application. This is true for maintaining existing services as well as for developing new services, protocols and applications. For both tasks it is important to understand how the networks, its protocols and applications can be monitored and analyzed. Typical goals for monitoring and analysis are: control whether a requested service level is provided or not, being able to predict the performance of protocols under development, understand how complex protocols behave in the real world, etc.

It is the goal of this module to teach the different approaches for monitoring and analysis, like simulation, emulation, measurements etc. and how they are applied for particular problems. We will refer to recent research activities to illustrate the problems, approaches, and tools that are used. By this, students will not only learn about analysis and evaluation of communication protocols, but also get an insight in recent research results from recognized European research teams.

At the end of the course, students will have gained an in-depth understanding of recent distributed systems and networking concepts. They will have acquired the skills to design, analyse and fine tune distributed systems and will have gained a deep insight into networking research.

They will not only be competent in understanding and advising on the companies' networking needs, but also be able to understand the implications of networking on the perceived performance of applications.