Hands on Networking

Introduction

Large-scale networks as the Internet are crucial for day-to-day communication and nowadays affect all areas of life. In parallel, near-field communication and personal area networks are becoming increasingly important for connecting the digital with the physical world and in particular an individual's health. Building and harnessing these communication systems requires in-depth understanding and practical experience on the concepts of networking as well as network programming and troubleshooting methods. Starting from the application layer, all important parts and components of networks are explained, down to some of the physical aspects of wired and wireless technology. Most importantly, these considerations are not only done in theory but are accompanied with hands-on labs, to apply the learned concepts in practical scenarios.

The Telecommunications Lab at Saarland University is offering this course to teach networking fundamentals to undergraduates, as these topics are not part of the mandatory curriculum in Computer Science Bachelor program.

Curriculum

The course covers four major areas, giving you practical and theoretical knowledge to create, maintain and advance network environments, which are essential for today's fully-connected world. The following questions (among others) will be answered in this course:

  • Foundations of Communication and Networking.
    • What are buffers and queues for, why do you need sequence numbers and what is the advantage of push over pull?
    • Why are forwarding and routing not the same and what makes a hub different from a switch?
  • Top-down Tour through the ISO/OSI Model.
    • How do applications, such as HTTP and Email, use the Internet as a communication infrastructure, e.g. using TCP or UDP connections?
    • How are packets forwarded across a cable, a sub-network and even across the Internet itself?
  • Designing and Troubleshooting Small Networks.
    • How to use WireShark for network analysis and GNS3 for network simulation?
    • How can I write my own firewall rules and fix misconfigurations in a network?
  • Development of Network Applications.
    • How to write server and client applications for the next exciting Internet application?
    • How to modify data streams to ensure reliable transmission over unreliable networks?

Organization

  • Credit Points: 6 (ungraded, except for Systems Engineering students)
  • Format: Lab (Praktikum)
  • Audience:
    • ​Bachelor Students (typically in 3rd semester or higher, highly motivated 1st semester are also welcome).
    • If you are a Master Student you can still participate, but as you might have attended the "Data Networks" core lecture or a similar course at another university, large parts of the theory we cover are not going to be new for you.
  • Schedule:
    • 2 weeks presence time (26th Feb. – 08th Mar. 2024)
      • Time: 8:30 – 15:00 (lunch break roughly 12:00 – 13:00 and shorter breaks as schedule permits)
      • Room: E1 3 HS003
    • 2 weeks for implementing small networking projects (09th Mar. – 24th Mar. 2024)
    • a small exam on March 27th
      • Time: 14:30
      • Room: E2 2 GHH
    • Re-Exam on May 21st
      • Time: 13:30
      • Room: C6 3 9.05
    • All the dates can be found here (as soon as they are fixed).
  • Language:
    • Lectures, Slides, Task Sheets, etc. in English.
    • Some instructors and tutors speak German so no problem if you don't understand something (bei Problemen: Fragen!)
  • Requisites:
    • Enough motivation and drive for taking part in a short but intensive course with many new concepts.
    • No prior networking knowledge required.
    • Elementary programming skills required (e.g. Programmierung 2, Programmieren für Ingenieure).
    • Rust skills are beneficial, but there will be tutorials on that.
    • This is not an open course, admission is needed (see below).

Admission

In order to ensure that you fulfill the requirements for this course and be able to keep with the fast pace, there is an admission test before the course starts. This is to ensure that you are not disappointed when putting a lot of effort (and free time in the semester break) into a course where you cannot keep up. Furthermore, this shows that you are dedicated and take the course seriously, which is needed for a short and intensive course as this one.

  • Date: 24th January 2024, 16:30
  • Place: E2.2 Günter-Hotz Lecture Hall
  • Duration: 30 minutes
  • Topics: Boolean Algebra, Bits and Bytes, Programming (a mock test can be found under materials)

Please register for this course if you want to take part in the admission. If you just stop by, there is NO guarantee that we have a booklet for you!

Internet Transport

Quick Links

Remark:

We will offer the course Internet Transport in a format considering the possibility for as well students as lecturer and tutors to give and / or consume parts of the course online using web-conference tools:

The course Internet Transport is a revised and updated version of the courses Media Transport resp. Future Media Internet. Hence in case you already successfully passed an earlier version you cannot gain credit points anew!

  • Course material, quizzes and assignments will be done in Moodle.
  • Lectures will be offered in Teams, in a hybrid fashion (lecture hall plus Teams).
  • The content will be based on our IT-book that is available in various formats (ipynb, pdf, html).

Course Details

Classroom

The lecture will be offered in a hybrid format (classroom plus remote participation via MS Teams). Under special circumstances it might be advantageous or even required to omit the classroom and switch to fully remote. This will be announced on time.

For participating remotely please join the MS-Teams Team by sending a join request under the following link: IT SS 2024 Team

Introduction

More than 20 years ago researchers observed distruptive changes in network and service architectures: Everything over IP, IP over Everything, inspired by the push of telephone companies towards Voice over IP, created the vision of a unified network and service architecture. The core observation has been that the internet—represented by its core-protocols, i.e. IP on the so-called network layer and TCP on the so-called transport layer—can be run over nearly all physical media (IP over Everything (IPoE)) and in addition can be used to carry any form of data imaginable: texts, images, graphics but also media like voice, radio or television (Everything over IP (EoIP)).

The course Internet Transport will introduce the requirements for the transport of media and other time-critical data over the Internet, introduce proper channel models, calculate the channel capacity of those channels and derive a framework for optimised media transport. We will look into both domains, the time and the reliability domain, showing that they partially contradict each other and that the transport—supported and partially enabled by the lower and the higher layers—needs to be rethought to fullfill the requirements of EoIP/IPoE. Besides giving an overview over recent specifications and standards (TSN, DASH) the course will introduce latest research results on predictably reliable transport protocols.

Prerequisites

Digital Transmission & Signal Processing as well as Audio/Visual Communications and Networks are recommended for this course. Students with solid background in Computer Networks and Error Correction, however, are also encouraged to participate.

Course Structure

Basic Rules

  • Please note that small changes and corrections will be applied to the lecture notes throughout the semester. If you find mistakes or have suggestions how to enhance the lecture notes we appreciate your input!
  • Please don’t hesitate to tell us if you have any comments or suggestions related to the IT-Book, the Quizzes, the Tutorials or organizational issues. We will improve it soon so you can benefit from it, not only future students.
  • There will be online weekly quizzes with 5 questions for 15 minutes every week. These quizzes are graded individually and the points will be published online.

Lectures

  • Place: Campus C6.3, Room: 9.05 (presence; remotely via Teams possible)
  • Time: Tuesday 12:30–13:45 and Wednesday 10:15–11:45 (start April 16th)

Quizzes

  • Place: Campus C6.3, Room: 9.05 (online via Moodle)
  • Time: Tuesday 12:00–12:30

Tutorials

  • Place: Campus C6.3, Room: 9.05 (presence; remotely via Teams possible)
  • Time: Wednesday 12:15–13:45

Exam Dates

  • The exams will be held as ORAL exams
  • Main Exam - Calendar Week 32, Exact Dates & Time: tbd
  • Re-Exam - Calendar Week 38, Exact Dates & Time: tbd

We will schedule all exam slots via Moodle. The exact time of each slot and how you can choose a certain slot will be announced at a later date.

Task Sheets

  • Task sheets are published on Thursdays and are available online.
  • You submit your solution and work on the tasks up to and including the following tutorial.
  • During the tutorial you can discuss and evolve your solutions and get up to three additional points.

Correction

  • The quizzes and task sheets for this course will be divided into two parts (6 each in blocks A&B). It is necessary to pass both the blocks individually to be eligible for the exam.
  • Weekly Quizzes and Task Sheets:
    • Each weekly quiz are worth 5 points total, which adds up to 30 points total for each Blocks A&B. These points can be earned individually by everyone.
    • Each task sheet contains minimum 3 tasks, which adds up to 18 points total for each Blocks A&B. These points can be earned if you individually can demonstrate your understanding on the task during the tutorial and by your submitted solutions.
    • Final points are calculated by adding up over all quizzes and task sheets within a block.
    • You need minimum 40% in total to pass a block and must pass both block A and B to be eligible for the exam.

Resources

Literature

Ramjee Prasad, Marina Ruggieri: "Technology Trends in Wireless Communications", Artech House Publishers, 2003, ISBN = {1-58053-352-3}

Mihaela van der Schaar, Philip A. Chou: "Multimedia over IP and wireless networks: compression, networking, and systems", Academic Press, 2007, ISBN = {0-12088-480-1}

Volumetric Imaging & Video: From Pixels to Froxels

Volumetric Imaging & Video: From Pixels to Froxels

The representation of (captured) images and video has remained unchanged since it's infancy: Images are represented as pixels per line and lines per image, videos simply are a series of images. But we've entered an era of severe changes in capturing content: Multicamera-arrays even in mobile devices, depth sensing via Time of Flight or Gated Imaging, volumetric capture via LIDAR and new capture paradigms like event-cameras show, that computational imaging significantly differs from classical film-based capture and hence new forms of representing images and videos are needed. The (pro-)seminar will review a palette of approaches for representing volumetric content. From multiview video plus depth (MVD) over point clouds and voxels we will introduce and discuss neural representations like neural radiance fields and neural surfaces as well as volumetric representations that consider the capture setup (Froxels) and we'll compare them to representations like point clouds or voxels.

Requirements: It's advantageous but not strictly required to have passed basic courses on Image Processing and/or Computer Graphic. You should be ready to read and review three scientific papers.

Places: 12 (7 Seminar + 5 Proseminar)

Dates:

  • Kick-Off-Meeting: April 23th, 2024, 14:15 in C6.3 Room 9.05
  • Initial Presentation (Planning, global introduction of topic): June 4th, 2024, 14:15 in C6.3 Room 9.05
  • Final Presentation: July 16th, 2024, 14:15 in C6.3 Room 9.05
You should be ready to read and review three scientific papers.

Tutor: Robin Kremer (kremer@nt.uni-saarland.de)