CST311 - Week 5

In this week's module we covered the "Network Layer." This included lab work that provided an overview of the Network Address Translation (NAT) protocol and IPv6. The readings for this week covered information on forwarding and routing, input/out, switching queuing and internet protocol. The part of the course that was the most interesting for me this week related to packet scheduling, as this was a topic that was covered in my previous OS course. It was interesting to see how the same concepts could apply in a different context (in this case networking) and how packets are queued over an outgoing link. I learned about Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ). In this discipline, arriving packets are classified and queued in the appropriate per-class waiting area. Essentially, it aims to allocate the bandwidth so that it proportional to traffic. Overall, this module's readings and assigned labs provided a good overview of the network layer and its key concepts.