Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept.

of CSE, UIU

Study Guide & Workbook

CSE 323 – Computer Networks

2nd Edition – October 2017

“This study guide is prepared as a guideline, not as a

replacement of the text book, for the course CSE 323 –
Computer Networks. The students must read the textbook to
have the required understanding for the exams and other
evaluations.

The materials are mainly based on the book Computer

Networking: A Top Down Approach,6thedition
Jim Kurose, Keith Ross, Addison-Wesley, 2013 and from the
companion web site of the book. Also, a number of useful
animations/videos and examples/exercises are given to enhance
the understanding of the students to achieve the course
objectives and learning outcomes as specified in the department
and university policies.”

- Mohammad MamunElahi
Assistant Professor, Dept. of CSE
LMC, UIU Cisco Networking Academy

© 2017 – Mohammad Mamun Elahi

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

CHAPTER 1
Computer Networks and the Internet

Section 1.1 – What is Internet?

1.1.1 A Nuts-and-Bolts Description
1.1.2 A Services Description
1.1.3 What Is a Protocol?

Section 1.2 – The Network Edge

1.2.1 Access Networks
1.2.2 Physical Media

Section 1.3 – The Network Core

1.3.1 Packet Switching
1.3.2 Circuit Switching
1.3.3 A Network of Networks

Section 1.4 – Delay, Loss, and Throughput in Packet-Switched Networks

1.4.1 Overview of Delay in Packet-Switched Networks
1.4.2 Queuing Delay and Packet Loss
1.4.3 End-to-End Delay
1.4.4 Throughput in Computer Networks

Section 1.5 – Protocol Layers and Their Service Models

1.5.1 Layered Architecture
1.5.2 Encapsulation

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

Some Basic Networking concepts

Human Network vs. Computer Network

A Network Application: Web Browsing

UIU Web Site:

http://uiu.ac.bd/index.html

IP Address vs. MAC Address (See animations: Hub.swf, Switch.swf)

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

Section 1.1 – What is Internet?

 Exercise 1:From figure-1.1, Identify:

o 4 end systems:

o 4 intermediate devices:

o 2 types of services by Internet:

1.1.3 What Is a Protocol?

 Exercise 2:
o What are the 3 keywords
used to define a protocol?

o List some well-known

protocols used in Internet:

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

Section 1.2 – The Network Edge

 Exercise 3: From figure-1.3, Identify:

o Network Edge:

o Network Core:

o 4 types of physical media:

o 4 types of network access:

Section 1.3 – The Network Core

 Exercise 4: How long does it take to send a file of 640,000 bits from host A to host B over a circuit-
switched network?
 All links are 1.536 Mbps
 Each link uses TDM with 24 slots/sec
 500 msec to establish end-to-end circuit

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

 Exercise 5: Suppose users share a 2Mbps (Megabits per second) link. Also suppose each user
transmits continuously at 1Mbps when transmitting, but each user transmits only 20 percent of the
time.
a) When circuit switching is used, how many users can be supported?
b) Suppose packet switching is used, why will there be essentially no queuing delay before the
link if two or fewer users transmit at the same time?

 Exercise 6:This question requires a little bit of background in probability (but we'll try to help you
though it in the solutions). Consider the two scenarios below:
 A circuit-switching scenario in which Ncs users, each requiring a bandwidth of 25 Mbps, must
share a link of capacity 200 Mbps.
 A packet-switching scenario with Nps users sharing a 200 Mbps link, where each user again
requires 25 Mbps when transmitting, but only needs to transmit 20 percent of the time.

Answer the following questions:

a. When circuit switching is used, what is the maximum number of circuit-switched users that
can be supported? Explain your answer.
b. For the remainder of this problem, suppose packet switching is used. Suppose there are 15
packet-switching users (i.e., Nps = 15). Can this many users be supported under circuit-
switching? Explain.
c. What is the probability that a given (specific) user is transmitting, and the remaining users are
not transmitting?
d. What is the probability that more than 8 users are transmitting? Comment on what this implies
about the number of users supportable under circuit switching and packet switching.

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

Knowledge Test # 1
Q.1 What is the difference between a host and an end system? List several different types of end
systems. Is a Web server an end system?

Q.2 List six access technologies. Classify each one as home access, enterprise access, or wide-
area wireless access.

Q.3 What advantage does a circuit-switched network have over a packet-switched network? What
advantage does a packet-switched network have over a circuit-switched network? What
advantages does TDM have over FDM in a circuit-switched network?

Q.4 Suppose users share a 10 Mbps link. Also suppose each user transmits continuously at 1 Mbps
when transmitting, but each user transmits only 20 percent of the time.
a. When circuit switching is used, how many users can be supported?
b. For the remainder of this problem, suppose packet switching is used and there are 20
users. Why will there be essentially no queuing delay before the link if ten or fewer users transmit at
the same time? Why will there be a queuing delay if more than 10 users transmit at the same time?
c. Find the probability that a given user is transmitting.
d. Find the probability that a given user is transmitting and others are not transmitting.
e. Find the probability that any one user is transmitting and others are not transmitting.
f. Find the probability that at any given time, all 20 users are transmitting simultaneously.
g. Find the probability that more than 10 users are transmitting simultaneously (fraction of time
during which the queue grows).

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

Section 1.4 – Delay, Loss, and Throughput in Packet-Switched Networks

 Four sources of packet delay

 Comparing Transmission and Propagation Delay

 Exercise 7: Consider the caravan analogy example shown in figure 1.17. Assume, propagation
speed of a car is 200 km/hour, caravan travels 20 km starting from 1st toll booth, and also there
are eight cars in the caravan. Assuming 2 minute service time for each car in the toll booth:
o What is the end-to-end delay (from 1st toll booth to 3rd toll booth)?
o How many cars will reach toll booth 2 before all the cars are serviced by toll booth 1?

 Exercise 8: Consider the figure below, in which a single router is transmitting packets, each of
length L bits, over a single link with transmission rate R Mbps to another router at the other end of
the link.

Suppose that the packet length is L= 8000 bits, and that the link transmission rate along the link to
router on the right is R = 100 Mbps.
a) What is the transmission delay (the time needed to transmit all of a packet's bits into
the link)?

b) What is the maximum number of packets per second that can be transmitted by the
link?

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

 Exercise 9: Consider the figure below, with three links, each with the specified transmission rate
and link length.

Find the end-to-end delay (including the transmission delays and propagation delays on each of the
three links, but ignoring queuing delays and processing delays) from when the left host begins
transmitting the first bit of a packet to the time when the last bit of that packet is received at the
server at the right. The speed of light propagation delay on each link is 3x10**8 m/sec. Note that the
transmission rates are in Mbps and the link distances are in Km. Assume a packet length of 16000
bits. Give your answer in milliseconds.

 Exercise 10: Consider following figure, where the sender transmits one packet of size L = 1
KB(kilobytes). The link speeds are R1 = R2 = R3 = 1 Mbps (megabits per second). The length of
each link is100 Km. Compute the end-to-end delay for the following situations. We assume that the
propagationspeed of the packet is 20,000 Km/s, and that the processing time of the packet at
each router is 5 μs, and both routers are store-and-forward routers.

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

 Packet Loss

 Throughput

 Exercise 11: Suppose Host A wants to send a large file to Host B. The path from Host A to Host B
has three links, of rates R1 = 500 kbps, R2 = 2 Mbps, and R3 = 1 Mbps.
a. Assuming no other traffic in the network, what is the throughput for the file transfer.

b. Suppose the file is 4 million bytes. Dividing the file size by the throughput, roughly
how long will it take to transfer the file to Host B?

c. Repeat (a) and (b) now with R2 reduced to 100 kbps.

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

Knowledge Test # 2
Q.1 What are the 3 basic parameters used to measure performance of a packet-switched network?

Q.2 What are the four sources of packet delay in a node?

Q.3 Consider a packet of length L which begins at end system A and travels over three links to a
destination end system. These three links are connected by two packet switches. Let di, si, and Ri
denote the length, propagation speed, and the transmission rate of link i, for i= 1, 2, 3. Suppose now the
packet is 1,500 bytes, the propagation speed on all three links is 2.5x108 m/s, the transmission
rates of all three links are 2 Mbps, the packet switch processing delay is 3 msec, the length of the
first link is 5,000 km, the length of the second link is 4,000 km, and the length of the last link is 1,000
km. For these values, what is the end-to-end delay?

Q.4 A packet switch receives a packet and determines the outbound link to which the packet should be
forwarded. When the packet arrives, one other packet is halfway done being transmitted on this
outbound link and four other packets are waiting to be transmitted. Packets are transmitted in order of
arrival. Suppose all packets are 1,500 bytes and the link rate is 2 Mbps. What is the queuing delay for
the packet? More generally, what is the queuing delay when all packets have length L, the transmission
rate is R, x bits of the currently being- transmitted packet have been transmitted, and n packets are
already in the queue?

Q.5 Suppose you would like to urgently deliver 40 terabytes (40 x 1012 bytes) data from Dhaka to
Chittagong. You have available a 1 Gbps dedicated link for data transfer. Would you prefer to transmit
the data via this link or instead use FedEx overnight delivery? Explain.

Q.6 Suppose there is a 10 Mbps microwave link between a geostationary satellite and its base
station on Earth. Every minute the satellite takes a digital photo and sends it to the base station.
Assume a propagation speed of 2.4 x 108 m/s.
1. What is the propagation delay of the link?
2. Let x denote the size of the photo. What is the minimum value of x for the microwave link to
be continuously transmitting?

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

Section 1.5 – Protocol Layers and Their Service Models

 Why Layering?
 Real life examples: Postal service, Air Travel, Office-to-office communication

 Computer network example: Development of a new Web Browser (Layering vs. No layering)

 Advantages of layering architecture: Modularity, trouble shooting, functionality reuse

 Monolithic network design (1 large main function) vs. Layered approach (Main function
calling smaller functions)
 Vertical vs. Horizontal communication

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

 OSI Layering Model:

L# Layer Name Basic functions PDU Encapsulation
7 Application Network services (email, file transfer) Data AH+Data
6 Presentation Formatting, encryption, and compression Data PH+AH+data
5 Session Setup and management of end-to-end conversation Data SH+PH+AH+data
4 Transport End-to-end delivery of messages Segmant TH+ SH+PH+AH+data
3 Network End-to-end transmission of packets Packet NH+TH+ SH+PH+AH+data
2 Data link Transmission of packets on one given link Frame DH+NH+TH+ SH+PH+AH+data+DT
1 Physical Transmission of bits Signal Bit streams (01100101011)

 Example topology: Communication using OSI model (See animation: OSI_layering_model.swf)

 Exercise 12: Suppose a process wants to send an L-byte message to its peer process, using an
existing TCP connection. The TCP segment consists of the message plus 20 bytes of header. The
segment is encapsulated into an IP packet that has an additional 20 bytes of header. The IP
packet in turn goes inside an Data Link frame that has 18 bytes of header and trailer.
What percentage of the transmitted bits in the physical layer corresponds to the message
information if L = 500 bytes?

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

Knowledge Test # 3
Q.1 How using layering architecture simplifies network operations? Specify 3 distinct advantages and
justify with examples.

Q.2 List five tasks that a layer can perform. Is it possible that one (or more) of these tasks could be
performed by two (or more) layers? If yes, give proper example.

Q.3 What is an application-layer message? A transport-layer segment? A network layer

datagram? A link-layer frame?

Q.4 Which layers in the Internet protocol stack does a router process? Which layers does a link-layer
switch process? Which layers does a host process?

Q.5 Find corresponding layer(s) of OSI model for every function in the following list:
i. Flow control.
ii. Encryption and compression of application data.
iii. Ensure reliable transmission of data between processes in different machines.
iv. Establishes, manages and terminates sessions.
v. Defines frames.
vi. Carry signals of raw data.
vii. Provides reliable end-to-end communication.
viii. Represent bytes as different voltages.
ix. Provides reliable transfer of data between two adjacent nodes.
x. Decides the path a packet will take across the network.

Q.6 List similarities and differences between OSI and TCP/IP reference models.

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

Q.7 Fill up the following table with contents specified in each column:

OSI Layer TCP/IP layer Why used (Main functions) PDU Name Encapsulation / Header Example protocols

Q.8 Use the above filled table to describe the flow of data from Host A to Host B in the following topology:

HOST A  SWITCH 1  ROUTER  SWITCH 2  HOST B

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