• Name: Prof. Herbert J. Bernstein
• Office: KSC 121, Lab: KSC 020
• Phone: +1-631-244-3035
• Email:

Office Hours:

• Monday, Wednesday 12:30 pm -- 2 pm in KSC 020 at the Oakdale campus
• Tuesday, Thursday 1 pm - 1:30 pm in A 209 at the Brookhaven campus
• By specific appointment on Thursday, 5:30 pm to 6 pm in A 209 at the Brookhaven campus

Students in the Tuesday/Thursday afternoon classes who cannot attend the scheduled office hours should make an appointment with Dr. Bernstein by email or during a class break to talk at a mutually convenient time.

There will be no meeting of this class on Thursday, 24 March 2011 (Spring Recess)
There will be no meeting of this class on Thursday, 19 May 2011 (Friday Schedule)

Note that, in general, Dr. Bernstein will be at the Oakdale campus on Monday and Wednesday afternoons and at the Brookhaven campus on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and Thursday evenings. If at all possible, please use email to schedule meetings in advance to avoid conflicts with other students and other obligations of the instructor.

For more information see http://www.bernstein-plus-sons.com/.dowling/HJB_Contact_Info.html.

Required Texts:

• William J. Cook, William H. Cunningham, William R. Pulleyblank, Alexander Schrijver, "Combinatorial Optimization," Wiley, NY, 1998, ISBN 0-471-55894-X, ISBN-13: 9780471558941
• Hwei Hsu ,"Schaum's Outline of Probability, Random Variables, and Random Processes", 2nd Ed., McGraw-Hill, 2011, ISBN: 0-07-163289-1. ISBN-13: 978-0-07-163289-8.
• Ed Tittel, "Schaum's Outline of Computer Networking", McGraw-Hill, 2002, ISBN: 0-07-136285-1, ISBN-13: 978-007136285-6.

Students are responsible for all assigned readings even if the material is not discussed in class. Much of the material required for this course will be on-line material. To conserve resources, most of this material will not be printed out for students. See:

• H. J. Bernstein, M. Goldstein, "Data Communications Lecture Notes Fall 1983" Data_Communications_Fall_1983.pdf
• H. J. Bernstein, M. Goldstein, "Network Design and Implementation Lecture Notes Spring 1984" Network_Design_and_Implementation_Spring_1984.pdf

Students are advised to bring the required texts to every meeting of the class to help them in classroom discussions and in answering the daily quiz questions.

Required Materials

• Avery 43462 hard-bound composition book, stitched, 10 x 7 7/8. A hard bound laboratory notebook. An inexpensive black-and-white covered composition book will suffice but it must be bound (not looseleaf).

  Keeping clear written records is an important part of working in any scientific field.

Students are expected to have their text books no later than the second week of class.

Attendance:

This class meets only once per week. Absence from any class meeting may cause the student to miss a significant portion of the material of the course. Therefore:

Attendance will be taken at all class meetings. All absences must be explained in writing (or via email). Students who miss one or more lectures must meet with the instructor to review their progress in the course. A midterm warning will be issued for any student who misses one or more lectures before the midterm, and such students will be advised to withdraw. Grades will be reduced for unexcused absences (see grading policy, below).

Arriving late disrupts the class for other students. To encourage and reward timely arrival, there will be a short quiz at the start of each class meeting. There will be no makeups for these quizzes.

Grading Policy:

• Notes: 10%
• Daily quizzes: 20%
• Project: 20%
• Midterm: 20%
• Comprehensive Final: 30%

All students will be required to participate actively in classroom discussions and to lead discussions related to the assignments.

All students will be required to communicate with the instructor via email, and many assignments will require work to be submitted via email.

As noted above students will be given daily brief quizzes. Quizzes will often be based on the assigned readings, asking material that has not yet been discussed in class. This is intended to encourage students to do the assigned readings. Even though the quizzes are open notes quizzes they are not not open book quizzes. Because so much of the material for this course is from on-line sources, it is critically important that students prepare their own notes from those on-line sources as well as the texts in advance of the relevant lectures. There will be no makeups for these quizzes.

Every student will be required to maintain a contemporaneous hardbound notebook recording all significant activities related to this course. The notebook should record the major topics discussed, questions about the subject matter of the course and the answers when they are found, and all activites related to the course project (see below). The instructor will borrow the notebooks several times during the semester and grade them for thoroughness, clarity and relevance to the course. Only the portions of the notebook that are dated, written in the student's own hand and on the permanent pages of the notebook will be considered in the grading. Students are allowed to rewrite their notebooks and/or to use multiple notebooks.

The only way to learn technical material such as this is to work with it.

Students must do the assignments steadily throughout the semester, not just to show that they know the material, but to give them the practice they need to learn the material well. Therefore, students are encouraged to submit all assignments on time.

There will be a closed book, open-notes midterm exam. The mid-term evaluation will be also be based on classroom classroom attendance and participation, the notebook, assignments and quizzes.

A closed-book, open-notes final will be given. In general, no assignments will be accepted late and no makeups will be given for missed quizzes or examinations. Requests for exceptions to this policy will be considered only for the most pressing reasons (illness requiring hospitalization, death in the family, reserve call-up, etc.), must be submitted in writing or by email in a timely manner, and will be granted only if the instructor has sound reason to believe that the student is highly likely to master the material of the course within the current semester.

Course Syllabus

• Administrative matters.
  • Dowling student accounts.
  • Diagnostic Quiz.
• Overview of the course.
  • Graph Theory Concepts
    See Network_Graph_Module
    • Physical graphs
    • Abstract graphs, Nodes and Edges
  • Shortest Paths
  • Circuits
  • Networks with Flows
  • Maximal Flow
    see http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=Static&d1=tutorials&d2=maxFlow
    and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford%E2%80%93Fulkerson_algorithm
  • Max Flow, Min Cut
  • Queuing Theory
    See Queuing_Module
    • Little's Theorem en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little's_law
    • M/M/1 queues en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M/M/1_model
  • Communications Networks
    • Error handling
    • Window management
  • Network Design
  • Transportation Networks
  • Routing and scheduling
  • Cost Optimization
    • Combinatory Optimization
    • Continuous approximations (Kleinrock Approximation)

  Course Objectives

  • Working knowledge and understanding of the use of network models in the design of information systems, transportation systems and project management.
  • The student should be able to make use of the major results in the area, including
    • Dijkstra's algorithm,
    • max-flow-min-cut,
    • the behavior of M/M/1 queues and the
    • Kleinrock approximation

  There will be an ungraded diagnostic quiz given during the first lecture to help students understand how well prepared they are for the work in this course.

  Assignments

  Please consult the course assignments page frequently, but the basic assignment that applies at all times is to read every page of the assigned readings and to do every problem, even though not all problems will be required to be submitted.

  Project

  You will have to demonstrate a grasp of the major topics of the course in a network design project. You may propose a network design project of your own by the second meeting of the class for consideration by the instructor. If you have not proposed an acceptable project by the beginning of the third meeting of the class, the instructor will assign a project. Projects may be done as solo or group projects, subject to the approval of the instructor.

  Dowling Computer Club

  If you're interested in joining with your fellow students in developing and maintaining a web site, or pursuing your exploration of computer hardware or software, you might want to consider joining the Dowling Computer Club. Just follow the link for further details:

  Dowling College Computer Club Web Site

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  Updated 24 February 2011.