NWEN 304 (2011)
The examination contains 5 questions, you must answer all questions. Each question is worth 20 marks. In general, all the material covered in lectures is examinable but we will focus on some areas more than others in questions 2-5. You may want to prioritise the topics listed below but this doesn't mean you should not revise related material.
Questions
- Allsorts. Ten short answer questions that are generally recall based. Drawn from right across the course.
- Security. Topics include cryptography, key exchange/distribution and authentication.
- Application layer. Topics include protocols stack, naming and DNS, tcp/ip, HTTP and multimedia.
- Network application design and architecture. Topics include properties of distributed systems, challenges for distributed systems, architectures, caching and replication protocols.
- Transactions and concurrency control. Topics include concept of a transaction (where there are multiple clients, one server), problems motivating need for transactions and concurrency control, locking, transaction components and interfaces, atomic commit protocols and concurrency for distributed transactions (where there are one or more clients and multiple servers).
Previous examinations
NWEN304 has not run before but some of the material has previously been presented in other courses so reviewing their exams might be useful. Below are some starting points for revision.
The first half of NWEN304 is quite similar to NWEN302 (2010) and its earlier version called
COMP306. The second half of NWEN304 has some similarity to NWEN401 and its earlier version called COMP413. However, although NWEN401/COMP413 covered similar material it is less of a good guide as it covered the same material we have but in more depth. I have identified a couple of useful revision questions here though.
Allsorts, security and application layer:
- NWEN 302 2010: Q1, Q2, Q3(a)(b). pdf
- COMP 306 2009: Q1, Q2 (except c), Q3, Q4 (a)(b). pdf
Allsorts, network application design, transactions and concurrency control:
- NWEN 401 2010: Q1, Q2(a). pdf
- COMP 413 2009: Q1(e). pdf
