Communication Networks | Electrical Engineering

Learn to design, develop, secure, and maintain constantly evolving wired, wireless, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT) networks.

Communication networks of interconnected devices are all around us. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to communicate digitally, access information on the internet, and store data. They play a critical role in supporting various sectors, such as healthcare, infrastructure, manufacturing, and environmental monitoring. Therefore, it is crucial to continuously improve their connectivity, efficiency, security, and reliability. Think of evaluating and improving a computer network of wired or wireless connections. What about detecting threats and resolving weaknesses before the network gets abused? If you are interested in studying and enhancing the information exchange within a communication network, including designing protocols, addressing security concerns, or optimising network efficiency, the specialisation in Communication Networks is a fantastic opportunity for you.

What is Communication Networks?

In this specialisation, you will learn to develop and enhance communication networks for a specific application. Think of modelling a Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or Beyond 5G network. Through computations and simulations, you will learn to optimise the network so that multiple users can share it without slowing it down. When building network systems, you need to consider security aspects, so you will explore internet security protocols, defence techniques, and web security principles. What’s more, you will learn to examine the performance of a network: are there delays in how quickly data is sent and received? Imagine ten packets of data arrive simultaneously. Is it possible that an 11th or 12th packet follows soon after? You will learn to design a system that avoids significant delays to ensure efficient communication.

Examples of courses you will follow within this specialisation:

In the course Internet Security, you will learn to critically discuss, select, and compare security mechanisms in communication protocols and understand the principles behind network security.
Discover solutions to a large range of networking problems associated with wireless and mobile communication in the course Mobile and Wireless Networking.
What performance evaluation techniques should you apply to analyse and optimise the performance of communication networks in the design and operation phases? Find out in the course Performance Evaluation.

Thanks to the research facilities at the EEMCS faculty and the guest speakers from partner organisations, you will gain hands-on experience and work on real-world problems and solutions. For example, you can design, simulate, and analyse the performance of an ad-hoc wireless network in different scenarios.

What will you learn?

As a graduate of the Master's in Electrical Engineering with a specialisation in Communication Networks, you have acquired specific scientific knowledge, skills, and values that will help you in your future career.

Knowledge
After completing this Master’s specialisation, you:
- have a thorough understanding of the key principles and contemporary technologies of wired and wireless communication devices, networks, and systems;
- know about security mechanisms in communication protocols at various layers, namely the data link, network, transport, and application layers;
- are familiar with the fundamentals of IoT, sensing and power, data communication, edge computing, machine learning, and related security aspects.
Skills
After successfully finishing this Master’s specialisation, you:
- can design and evaluate wired and wireless communication devices, networks, and systems taking into account aspects such as security and management;
- can quantitatively evaluate the performance of networked systems and their formal correctness using analytical methods and computer tools;
- have hands-on experience in conducting research and doing design work in a subfield of networked systems.
Values
After completing this Master’s specialisation, you:
- understand the ethical, social, cultural, and public aspects of various problems and solutions in the domain of communication networks;
- can integrate information from other disciplines into your own work;
- have a critical approach to reading and discussing international scientific literature in the field of communication networks.

Other Master’s

Is this specialisation not exactly what you are looking for? Maybe one of the other specialisations suits you better. You can also find out more about related master’s at the University of Twente:

Master's in Computer Science, Specialisation in Internet Science & Technology

Courses & research