ENN523: Advanced Network Engineering Assignment

1. Introduction

This assignment of TCP/IP communications is a group-of-two-or-three assignment worth 15%. Working alone without a group is not acceptable unless approved in advance by the unit coordinator under exceptional circumstances. The assignment project will require Socket Programming, which is the topic of Week02 Lecture and Week03 Tutorial.

The organisation of this document:

Sections 1 through 3 introduce some background information relevant to this assignment. The assignment tasks are described in Section 4. Section 5 highlights what and where you need to hand in your assignment. The marking scheme of the assignment is enclosed in Section 6.

This assignment relates to the following unit outcomes described in the unit outline:

1. Skills to undertake planning and design of computer networks to satisfy a set of requirements specifications with particular emphases on connectivity, scalability, reliability, security and QoS; and

2. Advanced collaborative and communication skills through a group project and formal technicalreport.

The criteria and performance standards used in this assessment are described in a table at the end of this document. Use the table as a marking guide.

You are asked to self-assess your assignment (in the enclosed marking guide table) and reflect on what you have achieved so far from the study of this unit. This gives you the opportunity to reflect on what you have learned from this assignment and also what you need to improve.

For self-assessment, submit a separate file of your self-assessed assessment sheet together with your assignment report. The self-assessment sheet is the table at the end of this document.

For reflections, writes a separate section of Reflections in your assignment report. Each of your group members writes a separate paragraph of your reflections specific to yourself.

Key technical aspects addressed in this assignment include TCP/IP communications, socket programming, timing control, and round trip delay. No-technical aspects of the assignment include teamwork, report and communication, and reflections.

2. Background: Dealing with Time

There are basically three types of methods to deal with time in C programming:

(1) Use some well-developed timing control APIs. For example, in Windows, a few functions are implemented in windows library (header file: windows.h); and QueryPerformanceCounter() can be used for high-resolution timing control. This is the method we have used in our examples and is recommended to you for this assignment.

(2) Using the standard time library. The standard time library provides a number of functions for time operations, e.g., time(), local time(), etc. Find a book or search the Internet to learn how to use this time library.

(3) Using a hardware timer interrupt, which is the highest hardware interrupt. In this assignment,you are not required to use this method.

For Linux users, sys/time.h declares a few time functions for high-resolution timing control, e.g., gettimeofday().