Computer Networking : Principles, Protocols and Practice

Abstract

ment. Today, there are high-quality and widely used open-source implementations for most networking protocols. This includes the TCP/IP implementations that are part of linux, freebsd or the uIP stack running on 8bits controllers, but also servers such as bind, unbound, apache or sendmail and implementations of routing protocols such as xorp or quagga . Furthermore, the documents that define almost all of the Internet protocols have been developed within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) using an open process. The IETF publishes its protocol specifications in the publicly available RFC and new proposals are described in Internet drafts. This open textbook aims to fill the gap between the open-source implementations and the open-source network specifications by providing a detailed but pedagogical description of the key principles that guide the operation of the Internet. The book is released under a creative commons licence. Such an open-source license is motivated by two reasons. The first is that we hope that this will allow many students to use the book to learn computer networks. The second is that I hope that other teachers will reuse, adapt and improve it. Time will tell if it is possible to build a community of contributors to improve and develop the book further. As a starting point, the first release contains all the material for a one-semester first upper undergraduate or a graduate networking course.