Local Area Networks (LANs) Course description: This course is about LAN specific technologies. Its first part focuses on shared media technologies such as Ethernet, Token Ring, FDDI and IEEE 802.11. The second part of the course discusses the switched versions of these technologies. As Ethernet is currently dominating in LANs, the focus of course is on this family of technologies, which includes Ethernet 10 Mbps, Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet. The course also covers new trends in the LAN evolution, such as wireless LAN: IEEE 802.11 and wireless Personal Area Network (PAN): Bluetooth. Finally, the course looks at particular features of LAN switches such as Virtual LAN (VLAN), Spanning Tree Algorithm (STA) and link aggregation. As TCP/IP protocols are used both in WANs and LANs, a lecturer may want to cover them in this course or (and we would recommend to follow this second option) may decide to teach them as a separate course. Course(s) to be taken before this course: Introduction to Data Networks. Chapters of the book on which this course can be based: Chapters 12 – 16 can be used as the basis for this course. Chapters 8-11 can be seen as auxiliary ones, as they provide in depth explanation of the networks’ physical layer functionality.