About this

These notes were wrote as a mean of studying and preparing for the final exam of Luca Ferretti's 2024 Course in UNIMORE's Computer Science curriculum, originally called Protocolli e architetture di rete; they're based on his slides and on his recommended book of choice, Computer Networking - A Top-down Approach by James Kurose and Keith Ross. There is not much of my own work here (pretty much none at all), just a watered-down and paraphrased version of the work of the authors I mentioned that (hopefully) could be a useful reviewing tool for other students.

The program

Here are the main topics of the course:

• Network Stacks and their layers, focusing especially on TCP/IP;
• Ethernet (Host-to-Network Layer);
• Autonomous systems, routing algorithms and router architecture (IP Layer);
• UDP, TCP and network sockets (Transport Layer);
• Domain Name System, types of name servers, resource records and resolution modes (Application Layer);
• WWW, HTTP and email (Application Layer);
• Notions on network security: Digital certificates, TLS, HTTPs, Firewalls...
• Practical configuration and analysis of simple networks using the free software Marionnet.

What is the Internet?