Preface

Overview

Coverage of routing techniques in various wired and wireless networks is the unique proposition of this book. Routing protocols and algorithms are the brains of any network. The selection of topics in this book is clear: we attempt to explain routing in its entirety, starting from fundamental concepts, then moving through routing on the Internet, and finally cutting across the recent-day cellular, ad hoc, and wireless networks. At the same time, the book has significant coverage of related topics, i.e. network reliability, management, and security. The core concepts elaborated in the book provide a foundation for understanding the next-generation networks and pushing them to their safe boundary limits. These concepts are integrated with illustrations and flow diagrams that will enable the readers to experience a fly-through of the routing processes over the devices.

In this age of rapidly evolving networks, this book stands at the intersection of historical network routing techniques and evolving concepts that the world is working on. The book builds on the foundation to create a 'network analyst' and a 'routing strategist'.

Organization of the Book

The book is organized into five parts, starting from a basic introduction and ending with advanced concepts.

The first part of the book presents the fundamental concepts of networks and routing. Chapter 1 provides basic knowledge about networks, addressing schemes, architectures, and standards so as to act as a foundation for those readers who have not done a basic course in computer networks. Routing algorithms based on various strategies are described in Chapter 2. All the major categories of fundamental routing protocols are covered in Chapter 3.

The second part of the book presents routing with quality of service and traffic engineering. Chapter 4 has complete coverage of QoS measures, terminologies, algorithms, and protocols. Chapter 5 is dedicated to traffic engineering and describes multiprotocol label switching and TE routing algorithms.

The third part of the book presents routing on the Internet. This part starts with exhaustive coverage of two major kinds of interior gateway protocol in Chapter 6, and ends with the detailed evolution history of exterior gateway protocol along with its operational details in Chapter 7.

The fourth part of the book presents all other routing contexts, from legacy networks to future-generation networks. The heritage ATM network is covered in Chapter 8, including frame format, architecture, service categories, and routing. Chapters 9, 10, and 11 present the characteristics, followed by comprehensive coverage of most of the routing techniques in contemporary networks, i.e. cellular wireless networks, wireless ad hoc networks, and wireless sensor networks. Chapter 12 is dedicated to the fundamentals, applications, and routing in upcoming networks for the future generation, i.e. 6LoWPAN.

The fifth part of the book presents advanced concepts related to network routing. Chapter 13 is dedicated to one of the major concerns in the area of network routing, i.e. security. The chapter contains sections on various kinds of attack, metrics to calculate exposure to attacks, security in battlefield networks, mobile agents for network management, and the upcoming area of cognitive security. Chapter 14 presents the fundamentals of network reliability, fault tolerance, and delay-tolerant networks.

Organization of the Chapters

All the chapters in the book are organized in a similar fashion. A chapter begins with the introduction of the topic, which includes the history or background and an overview of the topic. This is followed by a general description of the common terms used in the topic, for better contextual understanding, and then an in-depth description of the theoretical aspects. Applications of the topic under study may be covered at the beginning or at the end, depending on the ease of understanding for the reader as felt by the authors. Contemporary research being done in the field is also given appropriate coverage where deemed necessary. Each chapter has its own list of references, followed by a list of the abbreviations employed, for ready reference. This is followed by a set of questions to be used by instructors and students to test the understanding of the chapter. The chapter ends with some exercise questions, which the students are encouraged to attempt.

How to use this Book in a Course

The book will definitely be of help to computer and electronics engineers, researchers, network designers, routing analysts, and security professionals, who will be able to pick and choose between chapters and sections as per their requirements - to gain knowledge of the historical background, theoretical base, configuration details, ongoing research, or application areas. For those who have a basic background knowledge of wired or wireless networks, all the chapters are self-contained, and hence any chapter or a section therein can be selected at random for study.

For academicians, the suggested strategy for handling the book is a sequential approach with minor exclusions. The faculty can use this book in three different types of course.

Firstly, it can be used as a textbook for a course in network routing. The course can be offered to graduate or senior undergraduate students. A prerequisite course on networks or wireless networks is desirable but not essential. This book can even be introduced as a textbook for first exposure to networks in various branches of engineering, such as computer science, information technology, electronics, instrumentation, electrical engineering, or reliability. This approach has been tested with our student interns, who had not previously undertaken any course on computer networks and read this book so as to gain background knowledge of networks to work on the projects.

For a complete semester course in network routing, given the fixed number of instruction hours, a few chapters/sections from the book may be skipped, and students may read these either out of interest or to fulfil a project/assignment for the course. Chapters 5, 8, 13, and 14 may be skipped in their entirety. Chapters 5 and 8 cover legacy networks and are targeted at network professionals still managing these networks. Chapters 13 and 14 are intended for security professionals, academic researchers, and routing analysts. Certain sections from a few chapters also may not be taught in class. The section on exterior gateway protocol in Chapter 7 is an exposure to historical routing protocol, the coverage of challenges in mobile computing in Chapter 9 is written for the research community, and the sections on interoperability, applications, and security in Chapter 12 have primarily been written for network designers and researchers from the industry, and thus these sections may not be covered in the one-semester course curriculum.

Secondly, it can be used as a reference book for any course in computer networks, data communication, wireless networks, and sensor networks.

Thirdly, based on certain sections on contemporary topics in the book, it can also be used as a reference book in certain courses other than on computer networks, such as reliability and fault tolerance, cognition, mobile agents, unified modeling language, and tactical networks.

Supplementary Resources

The following supplementary resources have been prepared along with the book:

• detailed presentation slides for all the chapters,
• answers to all the questions,
• solutions to selective exercises.

Faculty and other readers of the book may contact the publisher to receive a copy of the supplementary resources or may access it from the website www.wiley.com/go/misra2204. Regular updates of supplementary resources, with addendums and corrigendum, if any, will be uploaded, and hence please visit the website once the course is on.

The presentation can be used by the faculty for classroom teaching. This presentation can thereafter be used by students for quick revision of the contents of the chapters. Even though the contents of the book give an insight into what the book holds, these presentations also provide an opportunity for researchers and academicians to take a quick peep at the contents of the book for selective reading of the chapters of interests for any particular requirement.

The answers to all of the questions posed at the end of each of the chapters have been provided. However, solutions to only selective exercises have been added in the supplementary material. Among the others, there are certain exercises that do not have a single solution. The solution to such exercises will vary depending on the profile of the reader and the ecosystem where the course is being taught, and hence may be attempted accordingly. Evaluation of these exercises should be based on the stepwise solution approach adopted by the students and not for binary marking.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank our families for their support, as the time spent writing this book was carved out of time that might otherwise have been shared.

We thank our colleagues at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, India, and the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO), Ministry of Defence, New Delhi, India, for their encouragement, suggestions, and help.

Special thanks to...