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End-Semester Examination
Communication Networks (EE 706), Spring’22
April 19, 2022; Total: 40 marks; Time: 3 hours

• You are allowed to use four A4 sheets with handwritten notes on both sides of each sheet
plus one more sheet with notes on one side, i.e., a total of nine sides.
• You are allowed to use any result discussed in class without proof. For all other results, a
proof needs to be provided.

Q UESTION 1 (2 M ARKS )

Determine the maximum length of the cable (in km) for transmitting data at a rate of 500
Mbps in an Ethernet LAN with frames of size 10, 000 bits. Assume the signal speed in the cable
to be 2, 00, 000 km/s.

Q UESTION 2 (3 M ARKS )

Consider an instance of TCP’s Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) algorithm

where the window size at the start of the slow start phase is 2 and the slow start threshold at the
start of the first transmission is 8. Assume that a timeout occurs during the fifth transmission.
Find the congestion window size at the end of the tenth transmission. Explain the steps and
write all the phases of congestion control clearly.

Q UESTION 3 (2 M ARKS )

You have two computers, A and B, sharing a wireless network in your room. The network
runs the slotted Aloha protocol with equal-sized packets. You want B to get twice the throughput
over the wireless network as A whenever both nodes are backlogged. You configure A to send
packets with probability p. What should you set the transmission probability of B to, in order
to achieve your throughput goal?
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Q UESTION 4 (2 M ARKS )

A network using CSMA/ CD has a bandwidth of 10 Mbps. If the maximum propagation time
(including the delays in the devices) is 25.6 µs, what is the minimum size of the frame?

Q UESTION 5 (4 M ARKS )

Fig. 1. This is the figure for question 5.

Answer the following questions in the context of Fig. 1. Justify your answers.
(a) Identify the time periods when TCP slow start is operating.
(b) Identify the time periods when TCP congestion avoidance (AIMD) is operating.
(c) After the 16th transmission round, is segment loss detected by a triple duplicate ACK or by
a timeout?
(d) After the 22nd transmission round, is segment loss detected by a triple duplicate ACK or
by a timeout event?
(e) What is the initial value of ssthreshold, before the first congestion avoidance interval?
(f) What is the value of ssthreshold at the 19th transmission round?
(g) What is the value of ssthreshold at the 24th transmission round?
(h) Assuming a packet loss is detected after the 26th transmission round by the receipt of a triple
duplicate ACK, what will be the values of the congestion window size and of ssthreshold?
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Q UESTION 6 (2 M ARKS )

(a) A and B perform Diffie-Hellman key exchange using p = 23 and g = 9. If A chooses her
secret to be 4 and B chooses his secret to be 3, then find the common secret that they agree
upon. Justify your answer.
(b) Generalize the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol from two parties to n parties, where
n ≥ 2. Note that at the end of this protocol, all n parties should agree upon a common
secret. Also, assume that only an insecure channel is available for the exchange of messages
among the n parties. Prove that your protocol works correctly.

Q UESTION 7 (4 M ARKS )

Consider the following pseudo-WEP protocol. The key is 4 bits and the IV is 2 bits. The IV
is appended to the end of the key when generating the keystream. Suppose that the shared secret
key is 1010. The keystreams for the four possible inputs are as follows:

101000: 0010101101010101001011010100100 . . .
101001: 1010011011001010110100100101101 . . .
101010: 0001101000111100010100101001111 . . .
101011: 1111101010000000101010100010111 . . .

Suppose all messages are 8-bits long. Suppose the ICV (integrity check) is 4-bits long, and is
calculated by XOR-ing the first 4 bits of data with the last 4 bits of data. Suppose the pseudo-
WEP packet consists of three fields: first the IV field, then the message field, and last the ICV
field, with some of these fields encrypted.
(a) We want to send the message m = 10100000 using the IV = 11 and using WEP. What will
be the values in the three WEP fields?
(b) Show that when the receiver decrypts the WEP packet, it recovers the message and the ICV.
(c) Suppose Trudy intercepts a WEP packet (not necessarily with the IV = 11) and wants to
modify it before forwarding it to the receiver. Suppose Trudy flips the first ICV bit. Assuming
that Trudy does not know the keystreams for any of the IVs, what other bit(s) must Trudy
also flip so that the received packet passes the ICV check?
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(d) Justify your answer by modifying the bits in the WEP packet in part (a), decrypting the
resulting packet, and verifying the integrity check.

Q UESTION 8 (3 M ARKS )

For each of the following claims, state whether it is true or false. Explain your answers.
(a) Consider sending a stream of packets from Host A to Host B using IPsec. Typically, a new
SA will be established for each packet sent in the stream.
(b) Suppose that the headquarters and the branch office of a company, which are in different
cities, are connected via a VPN deployed over the Internet. TCP is being run between a
host in the headquarters and a host in the branch office. If the TCP flow from the host in
the headquarters to the host in the branch office retransmits the same packet, then the two
corresponding packets sent by the headquarters gateway router to the branch office gateway
router will have the same sequence number in the ESP header.
(c) An IKE SA and an IPsec SA are the same thing.

Q UESTION 9 (4 M ARKS )

Given below are two protocols in which the sender’s party performs the described operations.
(a) Provide a step-by-step description of what the receiver does upon reception of c.
(b) State whether the following security services are achieved for each of the two protocols.
• confidentiality,
• integrity,
• non-repudiation (preventing an entity from denying previous commitments or actions).
Protocol A: c = ek1 (m∥H(k2 ∥m)),
where m is the message, H is a hash function such as SHA-1, e is a symmetric-key encryption
algorithm, ∥ denotes simple concatenation, and k1 and k2 are secret keys that are only known
to the sender and the receiver.

Protocol B: c = ek (m||sigkpr (H(m))),

where k is a shared secret key, kpr is a private key of the sender (not known to the receiver)
and denotes a digital signature.
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Q UESTION 10 (1 M ARK )

Assume that 32-bit initialization vectors are generated randomly in a WLAN using WEP.
Calculate the number of frames an attacker should collect before the first occurrence of a repeated
keystream with the following probability: (a) 25 %, (b) 60 %.

Q UESTION 11 (3 M ARKS )

A network with N nodes and N bidirectional links is connected in a ring, as shown in Fig.
2 and N is an even number. The network runs a distance-vector protocol in which the message
transfer step at each node runs when the local time is T ∗ i seconds and the computation step
runs when the local time is T ∗ i + T2 seconds, i ∈ {1, 2, · · · }. Each message transfer takes time
δ to reach a neighbor. Each node has a separate clock and time is not synchronized between
the different nodes. Suppose that at some time t after the routing has converged, node N + 1 is
inserted into the ring, as shown in Fig. 2. Assume that there are no other changes in the network
topology and no packet losses. Also assume that nodes 1 and N update their routing tables at
time t to include node N + 1, and then rely on their next scheduled advertisements to propagate
this new information.
(a) What is the minimum time before every node in the network has a route to node N + 1?
(b) What is the maximum time before every node in the network has a route to node N + 1?

Fig. 2. This is the figure for Question 11.

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Q UESTION 12 (3 M ARKS )

Alice implements a reliable data transport protocol in which each packet has an 8-bit incre-
menting sequence number, starting at 0. As the connection progresses, the sender “wraps around”
the sequence number once it reaches 255, going back to 0 and incrementing it for successive
packets. Each packet size is S = 1000 bytes long (including all packet headers). Suppose the
link capacity between sender and receiver is C = 1 Mbyte per second and the round-trip time
is R = 100 milliseconds.
(a) What is the highest throughput achievable if Alice’s implementation is stop-and-wait?
(b) To improve performance, Alice implements a sliding window protocol. Assuming no packet
losses, what should Alice set the window size to in order to saturate the link capacity?
(c) Alice runs her protocol on increasingly higher-speed bottleneck links. At a certain link speed,
she finds that her implementation stops working properly. Can you explain what might be
happening? What threshold link speed causes this protocol to stop functioning properly?

Q UESTION 13 (3 M ARKS )

Consider the following algorithm to construct a spanning tree of an arbitrary connected graph
G = (N , E):
1. Let n be an arbitrary node in N . Let N ′ = {n} and let E be the empty set ∅.
2. If N ′ = N , then stop [G′ = (N ′ , E ′ ) is a spanning tree]; else go to step 3.
3. Let (i, j) ∈ E be an edge with i ∈ N ′ , j ∈ N − N ′ . Update N ′ and E ′ by

N ′ := N ′ ∪ {j}

E ′ := E ′ ∪ {(i, j)}

Go to step 2.
Suppose N = |N | (respectively, E = |E|) denotes the number of nodes (respectively, edges) in
the graph. Prove that
(a) G′ = (N ′ , E ′ ) in the above algorithm is always a tree.
(b) E ≥ N − 1.
(c) If E = N − 1, then G must be a tree.
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Q UESTION 14 (2 M ARKS )

Consider a set of sessions P using a network (directed graph). Show that among feasible
allocations, the max-min fair allocation maximizes the minimum rate allocated to any session.
That is, if R is the set of all feasible rate allocations r = {rp : p ∈ P }, then the max-min fair
allocation is a solution of the following problem:
 
max min rp .
r∈R p∈P

Q UESTION 15 (1 M ARK )

(a) Is it necessary to provide encryption and integrity protection of signalling messages in a

wireless cellular network? Explain why or why not.
(b) UMTS supports a form of mutual authentication between the network and the SIM card.
What is the challenge from the SIM card and what is the response from the network (MSC)?

Q UESTION 16 (1 M ARK )

(a) State one significant difference between a circuit-switched and a packet-switched network.
(b) Give one difference between what a switch does in a packet-switched network and a circuit-
switched network.