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Reviewer: Florin Popentiu

The intended audience for this book is first-year graduate students in computer science. Advanced undergraduates who will be working in computer networking or related areas may also find it useful. This work is divided into three sections. The first section (chapters 2 through 4) introduces three networking technologies: telephony, the Internet, and asynchronous transfer mode. The second section describes some networking concepts and techniques. Chapter 5 introduces the concepts of protocols and the protocol layer. Some common system resources and techniques for making tradeoffs between them are discussed in chapter 6. Chapter 7 presents the multiple access problem, that is, how to share a medium where a transmission from one endpoint or base station can be heard by all the other endpoints. Some common switching architectures are described in chapter 8. In order to provide end-to-end quality of services, switches and other multiplexing points must implement scheduling algorithms. These algorithms are studied in chapter 9. The following two chapters deal with naming, addressing, routing, and error control. Flow control is studied in chapters 12 and 13. The problem of achieving end-to-end quality of services by managing traffic at multiple time scales is studied in chapter 14. Section 3 consists of chapters 15 and 16. It applies the material in Section 2 to the study of some real protocols and their implementation. This book is accompanied by a Web site that contains a range of supporting materials. I recommend the book to specialists in the field and to other researchers who are interested in an introduction to current research in computer networking.