A list of topics and information related to the network.

• Specific Network Technologies:
  • Ethernet: Duplex modes and auto-negotiation, LAN Collisions, LAN Broadcast Domains, FlowControl
  • Wireless LAN (802.11)
  • Mobile IP
  • Switches: Head-of-Line blocking
  • Router Performance: Architectures, Hardware Limits
  • End System Performance
  • InfiniBand, Remote direct memory access (RDMA)

• General Network Categories and Approaches:
  • Software Defined Networking (SDN), OpenFlow
  • Multiple Paths (equal-cost multipath, ECMP)
  • Data Center Networks

• Network performance metrics:
  • OWD
  • RTT (bandwidth*delay product and "Long Fat Networks" (LFNs))
  • delay varation (Jitter), loss, reordering
  • MTU / Path MTU

• Network protocols
  • Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) - terminology
    • Window-based transmission, performance enhancements - Large TCP windows, buffer auto-tuning, Window Scaling option
    • |Flow control and congestion avoidance, high-speed TCP variants and land speed records, Selective acknowledgements (SACK)
    • Multipath TCP (MPTCP)
  • User Datagram Protocol (UDP)
  • Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP)
  • Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP)
  • RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)

• Ethernet Operations, Administration & Maintenance (EOAM)

• Network tuning
  • Active Queue Management (AQM), Random Early Detection (RED), CoDel, Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)
  • Differentiated Services - Premium IP, IntegratedServices
  • Sizing buffers in the network
  • Network proxies or so-called WAN accelerators
  • Cisco (IOS-) specific
  • Support for large frames ("jumbo MTUs")