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ITEC850 - Network Management (Semester 1, 2010)

Unit Outline

Convenor: Milton Baar

Students should read this unit outline carefully at the start of semester. It contains important information about the unit. If anything in it is unclear, please consult one of the teaching staff in the unit.

About This Unit

ITEC 850 unit gives candidates an introduction to and an overview of the challenges involved in managing large enterprise networks and in developing effective solutions for managing such networks. The focus is on principles and background with an aim to provide candidates with a foundation to evaluate products and management solutions.

Teaching Staff

All emails related to the course ITEC850 should be sent to the above email and must include your full name and your student ID number.

Unit Outline

You may access the unit outline here.

Classes

Each week the student has to attend 2 hours of lectures, and an hour of tutorial.

• Lecture - Time & Location: Tuesday 6-8pm, C5C237
• Tutorial - Time & Location: Tuesday 8-10pm, E6A265

Note that Tutorials commence from week 2.

Required and Recommended texts and/or materials

• Mani Subramanian, /Network Management: Principles and Practice /, First Edition, Addison Wesley
• Zheng Wang, /Internet QoS: Architectures and Mechanisms for Quality of Service/, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers

You can purchase these books from the Co-op Bookshop.

Additional reading that you may find useful for this unit:

• William Stallings, /SNMP, SNMP v2, SNMP v3, and RMON 1 and 2/, 3rd Ed., Addison Wesley
• Stephen B. Morris, /Network Management, MIBs, and MPLS/, 3rd Ed., Addison-Wesley
• Charles E. Perkins, /Mobile IP: Design Principles and Practices/, Addison Wesley

Unit Web Page

The web page for this unit can be found at http://www.comp.mq.edu.au/units/itec850/outline.html. Note that the majority of the unit materials are publicly available while some material requires you to log in to Blackboard https://learn.mq.edu.au/ to access it. The unit will make use of discussion boards hosted within Blackboard. Please post questions there; they will be monitored by the staff on the unit.

Learning Outcomes

A student completing the unit should have:

1. A sound understanding of the enduring principles at work in a holistic, integrated approach to network management.
2. Understanding and in-depth analysis of SNMP (network management protocol, the defacto network management standard and other principle management protocols.
3. Understanding the management architecture from different perspectives (eg web view, network protocol view).
4. Understanding of design and analysis of network management systems.
5. Understanding of network management concepts such as Management Information Base and Structure of Management Information.
6. Ability to design, implement and manage network management solutions.
7. Understanding the perspective of an IT service provider responsible for maintaining Quality of Service levels.
8. Understanding the location management concepts in Mobile Networks.
9. Understanding the functionality of management tools and platforms used in the commercial world.

Teaching and Learning Strategy

ITEC850 is taught via lectures, and tutorials. Lectures are used to introduce new material, give examples and techniques and put them in a wider context. While lectures are largely one to many presentations, you are encouraged to ask questions of the lecturer to clarify anything you might not be sure of. Tutorials are small group classes that give you the opportunity to interact with your peers and with a tutor who has a sound knowledge of the subject. You will be given tasks to solve each week prior to the tutorial; preparing solutions is important because it will allow you to discuss the problems effectively with your tutor and maximise the feedback you get on your work. Each week you will be given an hour after the tutorials to work on the following tasks. It is important that you keep up with these tasks, as doing so will help you understand the material in the unit and prepare you for the work in assignments.

Each week you should:

• Attend lectures, take notes, ask questions.
• Attend your tutorial, seek feedback from your tutor on your work.
• Read appropriate sections of the text, add to your notes and prepare questions for your lecturer or tutor.
• Prepare answers to next week's tutorial questions.
• Work on any assignments that have been released.

Lecture notes will be made available each week but these notes are intended as an outline of the lecture only and are not a substitute for your own notes or the textbook.

Relationship between Assessment and Learning Outcomes

1. Assignment: 20 Marks
2. Group Project/Case Study: 20 Marks
3. Written Examination: 60 Marks

Your final grade will depend on your performance in each part separately. In particular:

• You must pass in the examination in order to pass this unit.
• You must pass in the assignments (taken together) to pass this unit.

All assignments should be handed in via the online Blackboard/WebCT system at https://learn.mq.edu.au/ by the time specified in the assignment description. All work submitted should be readable and well presented.

Late work will be accepted with a penalty of 10% of the marks for the assignment per day submitted late. Hence, an assignment submitted five days late will get at most half the marks. If you cannot submit on time because of illness or other circumstances, please contact the lecturer before the due date.

The University Examination period in First Half Year 2010 will be published on the Timetables website.

You are expected to present yourself for examination at the time and place designated in the University Examination Timetable. The timetable will be available in Draft form approximately eight weeks before the commencement of the examinations and in Final form approximately four weeks before the commencement of the examinations. http://www.timetables.mq.edu.au/exam/

The only exception to not sitting an examination at the designated time is because of documented illness or unavoidable disruption. In these circumstances you may wish to consider applying for Special Consideration. Information about unavoidable disruption and the special consideration process is available at http://www.reg.mq.edu.au/Forms/APSCon.pdf.

If a Supplementary Examination is granted as a result of the Special Consideration process the examination will be scheduled after the conclusion of the official examination period. (Individual Divisions may wish to signal when the Division's Supplementaries are normally scheduled.)

You are advised that it is Macquarie University policy not to set early examinations for individuals or groups of students. All students are expected to ensure that they are available until the end of the teaching semester, that is the final day of the official examination period.

Academic Honesty

The University defines plagiarism in its rules: "Plagiarism involves using the work of another person and presenting it as one's own." Plagiarism is a serious breach of the University's rules and carries significant penalties. You must read the University's practices and procedures on plagiarism. These can be found in the Handbook of Undergraduate Studies or on the web at: http://www.student.mq.edu.au/plagiarism/.

University Policy on Grading

Academic Senate has a set of guidelines on the distribution of grades across the range from fail to high distinction. Your final result will include one of these grades plus a standardised numerical grade (SNG).

On occasion your raw mark for a unit (i.e., the total of your marks for each assessment item) may not be the same as the SNG which you receive. Under the Senate guidelines, results may be scaled to ensure that there is a degree of comparability across the university, so that units with the same past performances of their students should achieve similar results.

It is important that you realise that the policy does not require that a minimum number of students are to be failed in any unit. In fact it does something like the opposite, in requiring examiners to explain their actions if more than 20% of students fail in a unit.

The process of scaling does not change the order of marks among students. A student who receives a higher raw mark than another will also receive a higher final scaled mark.

For an explanation of the policy see
http://senate.mq.edu.au/rules/Guidelines2003.doc or
http://senate.mq.edu.au/rules/detailedguidelines.doc.

Student Support Services

Macquarie University provides a range of Academic Student Support Services. Details of these services can accessed at http://www.student.mq.edu.au/.