CITS3002 Computer Networks

Welcome to CITS3002 Computer Networks

Welcome to the website for CITS3002. All teaching materials for the unit will be published, or accessible, from here.
No teaching materials are published in UWA's LMS.

This unit introduces students to the design and implementation of contemporary wired and wireless computer networks, the systems- and application-level software necessary to support their efficient operation, and the security and privacy factors introduced and enabled by networks and their applications.

Unit coordinators

Chris McDonald, Rm 2.20 of the CSSE building, Consultation time Wednesday 2-4pm, or email [email protected] for an appointment (please include 'CITS3002' in your email's Subject line).
Dr Atif Mansoor was our unit coordinator from 13th May until 4th June.
A huge thank you to Atif for his assistance at the last minute.

Consultation is reserved for discussing your enrolment, or personal circumstances affecting your progress in CITS3002 (not for debugging practical work).

Who's helping you in CITS3002?

Chris McDonald

Atif Mansoor

Jamir Khan

Nicodemus Ong

Jasper Paterson

Weekly teaching sessions

Students should participate in the following sessions each week. Attendance is not compulsory for any session (even the assessment items are optional). If any session is repeatedly and dramatically under-attended, then it may be cancelled.

Lectures - 90-minutes each week, starting week 1. Lectures are recorded and may be accessed via LCS. Recordings should be used to review the face-to-face lectures, and sometimes fail.
Laboratories - weekly, starting week 2. Practical work is a very important component of this unit, that reinforces lecture material, and prepares you for the assessed programming project. Each week in the first half of the semester will each have a structured laboratory sheet; the second half of the semester laboratories will be used for the team project.

The laboratory sessions are run as "drop-in-sessions" - times when there's guaranteed to be someone there to help - rather than "everyone gets a seat at their nominated lab session". Students should attend at least one laboratory session per week, and are welcome to attend more if requiring extra assistance. Most students will need to undertake 4-6 hours of practical/laboratory work each week. All face-to-face laboratory sessions will be held in CSSE Lab 2.05. Laboratory sessions are not recorded.
Tutorials - 1 hour each week, starting week 3. Tutorials involve around-the-table discussion on one or two questions each week, applying recent lecture material to contemporary networking topics. Not assessed, not recorded, and, sometimes, no single correct answer.

Learning Outcomes

On completion of this unit, students will be able to:

demonstrate an understanding of the basic physical operation of networks, including the concepts of data encoding and error detection and recovery;
explain the design motivation for, and operation of, contemporary wide-area, local-area and wireless networking technologies;
understand the TCP/IP protocol stack, and its support for client/server and peer-to-peer networking models;
apply industry standard networking programming interfaces from within procedural and object-oriented programming languages;
develop distributed applications for heterogeneous computer systems; and,
understand basic security and privacy factors raised by contemporary networks and their applications..

Assessment

The assessment for CITS3002 comprises a mid-semester in-class test, a practical project and demonstration (in teams of up to 4), and a final on-campus examination. Project work is submitted using cssubmit, and your marks and feedback will be returned via csmarks.

Assessment	% of final mark	Assessment dates	Outcomes assessed
mid-semester in-class test	20%	10:15am Wednesday 10th April (week 6)	1,2
practical project, teams of up to 4	40%	due 11:59pm Friday 17th May (week 11)	1,3,4,5,6
final on-campus examination	40%	2hours, in June	1,2,3,6

University policies

Before undertaking this unit, students are strongly encouraged to read the relevant university policies:

UWA's University Charter of Student Rights and Responsibilities,
UWA's Policy on Assessment - particularly §5.3 Principles of submission and penalty for late submission,
UWA's Policy on Academic Conduct, including:

In accordance with the University Policy on Academic Integrity, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is permitted as an educational/study tool. It may only be used in any assessment within a unit where approval has been granted by the unit coordinator. Improper use of AI-generated material, as set out in the Academic Integrity policy, in assessments may lead to the occurrence of academic misconduct.
CSSE's assessment deadlines.