The course aims at providing students with knowledge and in depth understanding of advanced computer network technologies widely deployed in modern networks or that are expected to become mainstream in the near future.

Students will acquire a knowledge, more or less in depth depending on the specific topic, and in depth understanding of mechanisms and motivations undelying the following technologies and solutions:
- IPv6 protocol and techniques to support its co-existence with IPv4.
- The most popular techniques and protocols used to implement Virtual Private Networks (VPN), both customer-provisioned and provider-provisioned.
- Voice-over-IP (VoIP) systems, based on SIP standard protocol.
- Protocols and techniques for audio and video transmission.
- Technologies and services deployed in wide-area-networks: ATM, Frame Relay, Sonet/SDH.
- Optical networks
- MPLS protocol architecture.

Attendance of this module requires fluent spoken and written English as a necessary pre-requisite: all lectures, lab sessions, and study material will be in English.
Knowledge on computer networks obtained in a bachelor degree (laurea) in computer engineering. In particular, excellent understanding of the TCP/IP protocol suite (IPv4, TCP and UDP) and technologies used to realized local area networks.

- IPv6 protocol (2 CFU)
- Virtual Private Networks (1,5 CFU)
- VoIP (Voice over IP) systems and SIP protocol. (0.8 CFU)
- Techniques for quality of service (QoS) support. (0,2 CFU)
- Wide area network technologies: Sonet/SDH, ATM, Frame Relay. (0,3 CFU)
- MPLS systems. (1 CFU)
- Optical networks (0,2 CFU)

The course consists mainly of classroom lectures that exaplain the technologies that are the focus of the program and motivate their deployment in modern computer and communication networks. Moreover, the course includes lab sessions to help retaining the concepts learned during the lectures by observing the correspoding technologies in action. Lab sessions cover the following topics:
- Configuration and observing the operation of IPv6 hosts and routers
- Traffic analysis in SIP-based VoIP deployments.
- Traffic analisys in access VPN solutions.
- Configuration and observing the operation of MPLS devices.

Due to the advanced nature of the topics addressed by the course, they are not covered by a single textbook or a limited number of textbooks. The course website provides, besides the overheads used during lectures, a list of links to documents publicly available over the Internet and references to book chapters that address the various topics discussed during lectures.

The exam is in written form and consists in two to four questions on topics addressed during lectures and lab sessions. Questions might be in the form of an essay, as well as requiring to draw network topologies or protocol headers, or provide configuration information for specific use cases. The duration of the exam is usually 70 minutes and the students cannot consult any material (books, notes, Internet sources).
All past exam papers are available on the course website as examples of the exam format.