Level 3 · Ph.D

Networking

Ph.D syllabus · 47 phases · +1 year

Every unit this programme teaches, in the order it is taught. Headlines only — the material itself opens once you are enrolled.

Dates, price and prerequisites

Phase 0 Foundations & tooling
Phase 1 The virtual lab
Phase 2 Signaling & encoding
Phase 3 Framing & Ethernet
Phase 4 ARP & neighbor discovery
Phase 5 Switching, broadcast domains, VLANs, STP
Phase 6 IPv4 addressing & subnetting
Phase 7 IPv6 addressing, SLAAC, NDP
Phase 8 IP forwarding (build the software router)
Phase 9 ICMP, ping, traceroute, path MTU
Phase 10 NAT/PAT & connection tracking
Phase 11 Fragmentation & reassembly
Phase 12 UDP & the socket API
Phase 13 TCP I — handshake & the state machine
Phase 14 TCP II — reliability
Phase 15 TCP III — flow & congestion control
Phase 16 Sockets, multiplexing & a tiny event loop
Phase 17 Static routing & forwarding tables
Phase 18 Distance-vector routing (RIP)
Phase 19 Link-state (OSPF) & Dijkstra
Phase 20 BGP, autonomous systems, path selection & policy
Phase 21 DNS (the Domain Name System)
Phase 22 DHCP & autoconfiguration
Phase 23 HTTP/1.1 → HTTP/2 on the wire
Phase 24 TLS handshake on the wire
Phase 25 QUIC & HTTP/3
Phase 26 Latency, throughput & the bandwidth-delay product
Phase 27 QoS, traffic shaping & AQM
Phase 28 Load balancing & anycast
Phase 29 CDNs & edge delivery
Phase 30 Overlays & tunneling
Phase 31 SDN & OpenFlow
Phase 32 eBPF/XDP fast-path packet processing
Phase 33 Cloud networking
Phase 34 Firewalls & stateful filtering
Phase 35 IDS/IPS & traffic analysis
Phase 36 VPNs & IPsec/WireGuard internals
Phase 37 Network observability & telemetry
Phase 38 Network automation
Phase 39 Capstone
Phase 40 Hardening, postmortem & "What's Next"
Phase 41 Portal integration
Phase 42 Pipes, FIFOs & Unix-domain sockets
Phase 43 Message queues & semaphores
Phase 44 Shared memory & record locking
Phase 45 Condition variables, monitors & local concurrency
Phase 46 Advanced sockets: socket options, raw sockets & SCTP