CS 421: COMPUTER NETWORKS SPRING 2014

FINAL
May 23, 2014
150 minutes

Name:

Student No:

Show all your work very clearly. Partial credits will only be given if you carefully state
your answer with a reasonable justification.

Q1

Q2

Q3

TOT
1)
a) (5 pts) Consider a modification in SMTP such that the sender’s user agent directly contacts
with the receiver’s mail server instead of using his/her own mail server as the intermediate
server. What might be a possible problem with this modified SMTP?
b) (5 pts) If an HTTP client wants to get a Web page, but knows only the URL of the HTTP
server, what application-layer and transport-layer protocols are needed to download the page?
c) (5 pts) Why does an application using UDP have more control of when a segment is sent
compared to an application using TCP?
d) Consider a home network which is connected to the Internet with an ADSL link that has a
download rate of 10 Mbps (10x106 bps). Assume that there are three file downloads from
servers A, B and C sharing the link and the ADSL link is the only bottleneck link for all three
downloads. The round-trip delays between the home network and servers A, B and C are 6
ms, 15 ms and 30 ms, respectively.
i) (6 pts) Suppose TCP is used as the transport layer protocol for all three downloads.
Calculate the throughput achieved by each download.
ii) (6 pts) Now assume that ADSL link is replaced by a fiber optic link running at 1 Gbps
(1x109 bps). Calculate the throughput achieved by each download.
e) (8 pts) Suppose that a file composed of 40 segments, each with a size of 1250Bytes, will be
transferred over a TCP connection with a round-trip delay of 10 ms and bandwidth of 10
Mbps, i.e., 10x106 bps. Assume that no loss event occurs during the entire file transfer.
Further assume that the slow start threshold (ssthresh) at the beginning of the TCP connection
is infinitely large. Ignore all processing and queueing delays and assume that ACK messages
have a negligibly small transmission time. How long does it take to transmit the entire file and
receive the final ACK?
2)

a) (12 pts) The network below uses the distance-vector routing algorithm. Assume the
following:
 Links have the same cost in both directions.
 Nodes exchange their routing info once every second, in perfect synchrony and with
negligible transmission delays. Specifically, at every t = i, i = 0, 1, 2, 3,..., each node sends
and receives routing info instantaneously, and updates its routing table; the update is
completed by time t=i+0.1.
 At time t = 0, the link costs are as shown below and the routing tables have been stabilized.
At time t = 0.5, the cost of the link (3,4) becomes 10. There are no further link cost changes.
 Route advertisements are only exchanged periodically, i.e., there are no immediate route
advertisements after a link cost change. Hence the first route advertisement after the link
cost change at t = 0.5 sec occurs at t = 1.0 sec. Note: However, whenever a link cost change
occurs, the two nodes at the endpoints of this link immediately make corresponding changes
in their distance tables.
 Assume that the distance vector algorithm does not use poisoned reverse.
1 8
2 1 6

1 4 1

1 1
3 4 5
Give the evolution of the distance tables with respect to destination 6. Specifically, give the
distance table entries for destination 6 at nodes 1-5, for t = 0.1, 0.5, 1.1, 2.1, ..., until all
distance vectors stabilize. Present your final answer in the table given below where D i (j) is
the distance vector element denoting the distance from i to j.

Time, t D1 (6) via D 2 (6) via D 3 (6) via D 4 (6) via D 5 (6) via
2 4 6 1 3 2 4 1 3 5 4 6
0.1
0.5
1.1
2.1
3.1
4.1
5.1
6.1
7.1
8.1
9.1
10.1
11.1
b) (8 pts) Suppose host A transmits a 4000 Byte IP packet (including the 20 Byte IP header)
over a 2-hop path to host B. The MTU of the first link (A to router) is 1500 Bytes (IP header
plus data), and the MTU of the second link (router to B) is 1100 Bytes (IP header plus data).
Assuming that IP header does not contain any options, indicate the length (in Bytes), more
flag, and offset field values (specify the offset values in units of 8 bytes) of the fragment(s)
transmitted over each link in the tables below.
First link Second link

Fragment Length Offset Flag Fragment Length Offset Flag

c) (5 pts) You are given the assignment of setting subnet addresses for 5 departments of your
company. The number of Internet connected PCs in each department is given in the
following table. Assume that the 139.179.128.0/18 address block is given to you for this
purpose. Use the following table to show the addresses of the five subnets that you created.
Campus # of PCs Subnet address (CIDR format)
1 5000
2 3500
3 1800
4 1000
5 900

d) (6 pts) Suppose that you are asked to develop the routing algorithm for a network
represented by a graph G = (N,E), where N is the set of nodes and E is the set of links.
Assume that link l , l  E, in the network has a transmission capacity Cl in bps. You decided
to use the Dijkstra’s algorithm in order to compute the shortest paths between node pairs.
Propose a path cost metric for a path p in terms of {Cl , l  p} so that the shortest paths
computed by the Dijkstra’s algorithm will have small delays. Justify your proposed metric.
3)
a) (6 pts) Suppose the data sequence 11001101 is transmitted using the generator sequence
1100101. Compute the CRC bits and the transmitted bit sequence.
b) (5 pts) Consider an Ethernet LAN using CSMA/CD running at 10 Mbits/sec. The propagation
speed for the signal over the cable is 2x108 m/sec. The distances between the nodes in this
Ethernet are given in the following table. Compute the minimum frame size in bytes so that
the CSMA/CD algorithm will work properly.
Distance (m) A B C D
A - 100 350 600
B 100 - 250 500
C 350 250 - 250
D 600 500 250 -

c) (4 pts) Why does the collision probability in Ethernet increase as the propagation delay
increases?
d) (5 pts) Why is it necessary for network layer protocols running on top of Ethernet, e.g., IP, to
have a packet length field in its header?
e) Assume that there are five active nodes competing for access to a channel using the Slotted-
Aloha protocol. Assume that each node has one packet to transmit. Each node attempts to
transmit in each time slot with probability p as long as it has a packet to send.
i. (4 pts) Calculate the probability that any one of the five nodes makes a successful
transmission in the first time slot.
ii. (4 pts) Calculate the probability of a collision in the first time slot.
iii. (6 pts) Calculate the probability that there are successful transmissions in each of the
first three time slots.