Advanced Internet Technologies

This addition to Prentice Hall's Advanced Communication Technologies series provides an engineer's look at today's cutting-edge Internet protocols and standards. Author Uyless Black lays out the basic technical details of the Internet and several up-and-coming multimedia specifications.

Advanced Internet Technologies opens with an excellent chapter on the history of the Internet. This chapter traces the Net from its origins to recent developments. The following chapter clearly presents the low-level architectural details of the Net, illustrating how TCP, IP, and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) all work together. This section digs a bit deeper into the architecture than the perfunctory introductions of most Internet books.

Black then presents a number of multimedia protocols, such as Voice over IP (VoIP), H.323, IPv6, PPP, Mobile IP, IGMP, RTP, and much more. These protocols are the foundation of tomorrow's products and make advanced operations, such as Internet telephony, wireless Internet access, multicasting, and time synchronization, possible.

This alphabet soup of technical specifications is demystified with a textbook-style presentation, complete with plenty of diagrams and tables. While many of the protocol details covered here are hidden from most Web users, network administrators and others interested in the down-and-dirty details will find this book to be a valuable reference. --Stephen W. Plain