This week's Cognitive Review is a little different: you'll find that these questions will require a little more free-ranging research and thinking on your part. But you'll also find that they may help you set the stage for your Group Project this week, or that working on these questions will help you identify key topics and ideas to look for in the research you and your group will be doing in that Project.

1. Consider what the book describes about MPLS being originally envisioned to improve routing speed over the network; but when network routing technologies improved, that need wasn't as compelling. Yet MPLS seems to survive and flourish as a connection technology. What does this suggest to you about how to "future-proof" the design of an organization's network-based information processing systems?

2. At its simplest, all information processing that people and organizations perform is a series of Input-Processing-Output steps, chained together in complex and iterative ways. We often speak of "value-added" processing as the steps that really transform the data into something significant to an organization's strategic objectives or needs. For an oil company, that might be the step that takes data from seismic tests and field surveys and transforms it in to the "drill a test well here" decision; a refinery operator in the same company might see the real value-added processing as the real-time process control actions that run the refinery, moment by moment. In one case, safety and responsiveness requires the value-added processing to be very, very local to the refinery; in other cases, where the processing is done vs. where the input and/or output occur can be many, many "network hops" apart. How does the rapidly-changing set of network capabilities, and their costs, affect how a systems designer needs to think about this "split" of what processing occurs where in their system, with what kind of network links in between?

3. Troubleshooting. Given what we have studied to date, and your own experiences out there in "Network World," what is it that makes modern computer networks so easy -- or so difficult -- to maintain and troubleshoot? Use examples to illustrate your answer.

4. You've been hired to be part of the team building a mission control and reporting system for a new UAV system, designed to serve the urban traffic management and public safety marketplace. The project does NOT want to have to field its own set of radio networks, etc., to be able to control the aircraft as they drift slowly about over cities like Los Angeles, issuing synthesized "Sig Alerts" to the local authorities and news media. You've been asked to consider the trade-off between on-board autonomy of the UAV, and reliability and throughput of the links between mission control and the UAV. How might you evaluate the different network technologies in light of this mission need? Aircraft and passenger connectivity needs

5. In the 1995 science-fiction box-office bonanza "Independence Day," our hero manages to thwart a space-going alien race's attempt to conquer the Earth by infecting its space armada's onboard control networks with a computer virus. What does this suggest about the relative compatibility of the alien's design philosophy, when it comes to networks? Are they using TCP/IP or ISO OSI - like protocol stacks? If they were not, how could such a malware counter-attack ever succeed? And what might this, in general, suggest about our abilities to communicate with any truly alien systems?