Date: Wednesday, October 7, 2026 (Week 7)
Time: 3:30 PM, at the start of our regular class
Length: 120 minutes
Room: Philips Hall B156, our regular classroom
Covers: Chapters 1–3: networking overview, the application layer, and the transport layer

What you may and may not bring

Allowed:

  • Worksheets and Quizzes. All of them linked on the schedule. With the exception of the DNS homework (since printing it is too awkward) – make some notes on your sheet instead!
  • One page of handwritten notes. Your own cheat sheet.

Not allowed:

  • Study guides. The study guides linked below are for preparing before the exam. They are not allowed in the exam.
  • Your DNS take-home quiz as mentioned above.

Preparing

  1. Review the material so far. Everything from Weeks 1–6 is on the schedule: the class slides, the textbook slides and videos for Chapters 1–3, and the worksheets and quizzes from class. The table below gives key concepts to be sure you understand.
  2. Redo the worksheets and quizzes, then check your answers with the study guides. Work each question again on paper, without looking at your old answers, then check it against the matching study guide below.
  3. Get your exam materials ready. Write your one page of handwritten notes, and gather the worksheets and quizzes you want to bring. Blank versions are linked from the course schedule.

Questions about the exam? Ask on #help channel on Discord.

Study guides

Each guide has every question from its worksheets and quizzes, with hints you can reveal one at a time before checking the answer.

  • Weeks 1–4 Study Guide: the Chapter 1 and 2 worksheets, Quizzes 2–4, and the UDP and RDT worksheets. It includes some extra questions from the RDT worksheet that we never did in class (e.g., the NAK-free version, which won’t be on the exam).
  • TCP Worksheet Study Guide: ACK generation and fast retransmit, the 2-way and 3-way handshakes, and why y must be new.
  • Timeline Worksheet Study Guide: drawing a DNS lookup and a whole persistent HTTP connection.

What to focus on

Topic Practice
Throughput and the bottleneck link Ch. 1 Worksheet Q4, Quiz 2 Q1
Transmission vs. propagation delay, store-and-forward Ch. 1 Worksheet Q2–Q3
Circuit vs. packet switching Ch. 1 Worksheet Q1 part 2
Queuing delay: waiting behind the packets ahead of you Chapter 1 Slides
Page load time: non-persistent, parallel, persistent Ch. 2 Worksheet Q1, Quiz 2 Q2
DNS: iterated queries and caching Quiz 3 (DNS), Timeline Worksheet Q1
The Internet’s layered architecture Chapter 1 Slides
Seq and ACK numbers, duplicate ACKs, fast retransmit TCP Worksheet Q1
The handshake, and a whole HTTP connection Timeline Worksheet Q2, TCP Worksheet Q2–Q3
Walking a state machine, message by message RDT Worksheet Q1–Q2, Ch. 2 Worksheet Q2
Lost messages, timeouts and retransmissions UDP Worksheet part 5
Reliable Data Transfer protocols Slides 53–56 and RDT worksheet/quiz
UDP vs. TCP sockets Quiz 4 Q2–Q3
Pipelining vs. stop-and-wait Slides 59–73

This is not meant to be a fully comprehensive list, but it shows where to find key topics that you can expect to see on the exam.