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Take-Home Assignment in Computer Communications: EDA 344/DIT423-Chalmers and Gothenburg University

This document provides instructions for a take-home assignment on computer communications. It includes 12 questions about topics like finding a computer's hostname and IP address, understanding cookies, using the nslookup command, port numbers for common protocols, messaging protocols like SMS and WhatsApp, Skype video conferencing bandwidth usage, DNS spoofing scenarios, problems NATs cause for IPsec, Netflix's CDN strategy, peer-to-peer file sharing through NATs, separating a network's data and control planes, and reflections on the future of networking from expert interviews. Students are asked to justify their answers, cite research as needed, and submit a group report in PDF format.

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Blake Burgess
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55 views1 page

Take-Home Assignment in Computer Communications: EDA 344/DIT423-Chalmers and Gothenburg University

This document provides instructions for a take-home assignment on computer communications. It includes 12 questions about topics like finding a computer's hostname and IP address, understanding cookies, using the nslookup command, port numbers for common protocols, messaging protocols like SMS and WhatsApp, Skype video conferencing bandwidth usage, DNS spoofing scenarios, problems NATs cause for IPsec, Netflix's CDN strategy, peer-to-peer file sharing through NATs, separating a network's data and control planes, and reflections on the future of networking from expert interviews. Students are asked to justify their answers, cite research as needed, and submit a group report in PDF format.

Uploaded by

Blake Burgess
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Take-home assignment in Computer Communications

EDA 344/DIT423- Chalmers and Gothenburg University


Justify/explain your answers. For several of the questions it will be useful to do some information research
to answer. Please answer in English, to the extent that is possible. Submit your group report via the
submissions system, in pdf, having a front page with the authors’ names, emails and group number.

1. How can you find out the hostname and IP address of a computer you use?
2. Look at a cookie that the web browser has saved on your machine. Try to understand the contents of
the file. What does it contain? It may help to connect via telnet to a web site that uses cookies and
look at the header when it sends the cookie line to the client. The standard RFC may also help you
finding the info.
3. What does the command nslookup do? Use it to find a web server that has multiple IP addresses.
Why can multiple IP addresses be useful?
4. Visit the IANA web site (http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers). What port numbers are used
for HTTP, Telnet, IMAP and DNS? What does IANA do?
5. SMS, iMessage and WhatsApp are smartphone real-time messaging systems. After doing some
information research, for each of these systems write a paragraph about the protocols they use.
Complement with a paragraph explaining how they differ.
6. Consider a conference call in Skype, with N > 2 participants. Suppose each participant generates a
constant stream of r bps.
a. Assuming this is an audio conference, how many bits per second (bps) will the call initiator
need to send? How many bps will each of the other N-1 participants need to send? What is
the total rate, aggregated over all participants?
b. Address the same questions as in (a), now considering that this is a video conference and the
initiator acts as central server.(Hint: think that audio streams can be combined into a single
audio stream, while video streams cannot).
c. Consider a video conference as in (b) but now each peer sends a copy of its video stream to
each of the N-1 other peers. What is the total rate, aggregated over all participants?
7. Suppose that an intruder could insert/remove DNS messages into/from the network. Give some
scenarios showing the problems that such an intruder could cause.
8. Discuss some of the problems NATs cause for IPsec security (see L.Phifer, “The trouble with NAT”,
The Internet Journal, vol. 4, n. 4,
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/ac174/ac182/about_cisco_ipj_archive_article_list.html)
9. What is the server placement strategy adopted by Netflix for its CDN? How is content replicated at the
different servers?
10. In a P2P application, suppose a peer with username Arnold discovers a peer with username
Bernadette, who has a file it wants to download. If Bernadette and Arnold are each behind a NAT,
devise a technique that will allow Arnold to establish a TCP connection with Bernadette without
application-specific NAT configuration. If you have difficulty devising such a technique, discuss why.
11. Explain the motivation for distinguishing between data plane and control plane in the network layer.
12. Read some of the interviews in your book, focusing in particular on the question of “How do you see
for the future of networking and the Internet”. Make a summary of views in 1/2-1 page. What are your
own reflections on the issues pointed out?

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