CST 311 - Week 6

 This week we went covered chapter 5 of the textbook, which dealt with the control plane within the network layer. The control-plane is the network-wide logic that controls how a datagram is routed and also how the network-layer components and services are configured and managed. Later in the chapter we talked about two main routing protocols: OSPF, which exists within a single network and BGP, which interconnects all of the networks that make up the internet. Finally we covered some ways of managing an IP network -- ICMP, the Internet Control Message Protocol, and SNMP, the Simple Network Management Protocol. The thing that stood out the most to me this week was the review of shortest-path algorithms. While I've learned about Djikstra's algorithm in previous courses, I definitely needed to review how to trace it through the nodes. The worksheet for practicing this proved to be extremely useful and I looked up a few other videos to help me feel more comfortable with the content as well.