Key ideas in Networking

A few key ideas make the Internet and other communication networks pos- sible. This book reviews these ideas that are sometimes cluttered by the numerous implementation details. Our intended reader is someone who wants to get a quick sense of how the Internet works but does not want to delve into technical stuff. We hope practicing engineers and students will find the next text useful. We focus on first order ideas: Internet transmits data as packets; the addressing is based on the location: the routing is hierarchical and roughly shortest path; the protocols are arranged in layers; the transport layer su- pervises the transmissions end to end; the directory service DNS finds the addresses; peer-to-eer makes every user into a server; quality of service could be improved by simple scheme; finally, Wi-Fi devices use a clever scheme to share a common radio channel.