Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet - Hardcover

Certain data-communication protocols hog the spotlight, but they all have a lot in common. Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet explains the engineering problems inherent in communicating digital information from point to point. The top-down approach mentioned in the subtitle means the book starts at the top of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) protocol stack--with the application layer--and works its way down through the other six layers until it reaches bare wire. The approach is definitely theoretical--don't look here for instructions on configuring Windows 2000 or a Cisco router--but it is relevant to reality and should help anyone who needs to understand networking as a programmer, system architect or even administration guru.

The treatment of the network layer, where routing takes place, is typical of the style overall. In discussing routing, authors Kurose and Ross explain (by way of lots of clear, definition-packed text) what routing protocols need to do: find the best route to a destination. They then present the mathematics that determine the best path, show some C code that implements those algorithms and illustrate the logic with excellent conceptual diagrams. Real-life implementations of the algorithms--including Internet Protocol (both IPv4 and IPv6) and several popular IP routing protocols--help you make the transition from pure theory to networking technologies. --David Wall

Since January 1998, Keith Ross is a Professor and Department Head in the Multimedia Communications Department at Institute EurEcom, in Sophia Antipolis, France. From 1985 to December 1997, Keith Ross was with the University of Pennsylvania, Department of Systems Engineering, as Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor.

He has published over 40 papers in leading journals and has published a book on multiservice loss models for broadband telecommunication networks. Along with Jim Kurose, he is currently writing an online multimedia textbook on Internet protocols and data networks. He is or has been on the following editorial boards: Queuing Systems, Theory and Applications; Probability in the Engineering and Information Sciences; Operations Research; Telecommunications Systems; and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. He was the Program Chairman of the 1995 INFORMS Telecommunications Conference. He received his MS from Columbia University (1981) in Electrical Engineering , and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (1985) in Computer, Information and Control Engineering.

Jim Kurose received a B.A. degree in physics from Wesleyan University in 1978 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Columbia University in 1980 and 1984, respectively. He is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, where he is also co-director of the Networking Research Laboratory of the Multimedia Systems Laboratory. He is currently serving a term as Chairman of the Department of Computer Science. Professor Kurose was a Visiting Scientist at IBM Research during the 1990/91 academic year, and at INRIA and at EURECOM, both in Sophia Antipolis, France, during the 1997/98 academic year.

His research interests include real-time and multimedia communication, network and operating system support for servers, and modeling and performance evaluation. Dr. Kurose is the past Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Communications and of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. He has been active in the program committees for IEEE Infocom, ACM SIGCOMM, and ACM SIGMETRICS conferences for a number of years.

He is the six-time recipient of the Outstanding Teacher Award from the National Technological University (NTU), the recipient of the Outstanding Teacher Award from the College of Science and Natural Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts, and the recipient of the 1996 Outstanding Teaching Award of the Northeast Association of Graduate Schools. He has been the recipient of a GE Fellowship, IBM Faculty Development Award, and a Lilly Teaching Fellowship. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and a member of ACM, Phi Beta Kappa, Eta Kappa Nu, and Sigma Xi.

He is currently working on an on-line introductory networking textbook, "Computer Networking: A Top Down Approach Featuring the Internet," with Keith Ross. The book is available on-line, and is to be published by Addison-Wesley Longman in 2000.

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