Based on the proposed course timeline as of the end of September this is a start at course level learning outcomes. Currently the major bullet is the expression of the course level learning outcome and the subpoints highlight some of the topics/things I can imagine would be covered or done to achieve the learning outcome.

At the end of the course a student should be able to:

• Write and/or modify programs that use the socket API.

• Measure and discover key properties (latency, bandwidth, jitter, error rates, topology) about a network and apply the resulting information to the design of network based applications.

• Use the socket API to write programs that can establish TCP connections, accept TCP connections, exchange data, and terminate connections. Such programs would also be expected to handle connection setup and premature connection termination problems.
  • Socket API
  • Handling of connection setup failures and transmission failures

• Compare and contrast a reliable streamed protocol (like TCP) to an unstreamed unreliable protocol and when given a problem justify the type of protocol to use.

• Compare and contrast different models for distributing data and when provided with a particular data distribution problem select and justify the choice of an appropriate distribution model.
  • Client/server (? not sure if this is part of this or not)
  • publish/subscribe, data buses

• Apply various design and implementation strategies to improve the performance of a network based application given the properties of the application and network it is to run on.
  • streaming/chunking
  • parallel operations

• Design(? might be in another learning outcome) and implement/modify programs that use various common networking interfaces.
  • socket API
  • multimedia API
  • error handling
  • lost and out of order packets.