CN Notes
CN Notes
Unit I - Introduction: Uses of Computer Networks - Network Hardware - Network Software -Reference
Models - Example Networks.
1. Computer Network
A computer network is a set of computers connected together for the purpose of sharing resources.
The most common resource shared today is connection to the internet.
2. Goals of networking:
Resource sharing
High reliability
Save money
Scalability
Powerful communication medium
1
3.3 Mobile Users
Mobile computers, such as notebook computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are connected
to the office or home even when away from home.
People on the road use their portable electronic equipment to send and receive telephone calls, faxes,
and electronic mail, surf the Web, access remote files, and log on to remote machines.
People do this from anywhere on land, sea, or air.
SMS
M-Commerce
GPS
4. Network hardware
It depends on transmission technology and scale.
4.1 Transmission Technology
There are two types of transmission technology:
1. Broadcast links.
2. Point-to-point links.
4.1.1 Broadcast link
Broadcast networks have a single communication channel that is shared by all the machines on the
network.
Short messages, called packets sent by any machine are received by all the others.
An address field within the packet specifies the intended recipient.
On receiving a packet, a machine checks the address field.
If the packet is intended for the receiving machine, that machine processes the packet; if the packet is
intended for some other machine, it is just ignored.
Broadcast systems also allows the possibility of addressing a packet to all destinations by using a
special code in the address field.
Some broadcast systems support transmission to a subset of the machines, called as multicasting.
4.1.2 Point-to-point link
Point-to-point networks consist of many connections between individual pairs of machines.
Point-to-point transmission with one sender and one receiver is sometimes called unicasting.
4.2 Scale
An alternative criterion for classifying networks is their scale.
The table classifies networks according to their scale.
2
4.2.1 Personal Area Networks
It communicate over the range of person.
Its coverage area of the network is within a meter.
Ex.Bluetooth
In a bus network, at any instant at most one machine is the master and is allowed to transmit. All
other machines are required to refrain from sending. Eg: IEEE 802.3(Ethernet).
In the ring system each bit propagates around on its own, not waiting for the rest of the packet to
which it belongs. Eg: IEEE 802.5 (the IBM token ring).
4.2.3 Metropolitan Area Networks
A metropolitan area network, or MAN, covers a city like cable television network available in many
cities.
3
4.2.4 Wide Area Networks
A wide area network, or WAN,covers large geographical area, often a country or continent.
It contains a collection of machines intended for running user programs.
The hosts are connected by a communication subnet.
The hosts are owned by the customers, whereas the communication subnet is owned and operated by
a telephone company or Internet service provider.
The job of the subnet is to carry messages from host to host.
In most wide area networks, the subnet consists of two distinct components: transmission lines and
switching elements.
Transmission lines move bits between machines. They can be made of copper wire, optical fiber, or
even radio links.
Switching elements are specialized computers that connect three or more transmission lines.
When data arrive on an incoming line, the switching element must choose an outgoing line on which
to forward them. These switching computers are called router.
The collection of communication lines and routers that move packets from the source host to the
destination host form the subnet.
When a packet is sent from one router to another via one or more intermediate routers, the packet is
received at each intermediate router in its entirety, stored there until the required output line is free,
and then forwarded.
This is called store-and-forward or packet-switched subnet.
If the packets are small and all the same size, they are called cells.
A process on some host has a message to be sent to a process on some other host, the sending host
first cuts the message into packets, each one bearing its number in the sequence.
These packets are then injected into the network one at a time in quick succession.
The packets are transported individually over the network and deposited at the receiving host, where
they are reassembled into the original message and delivered to the receiving process.
4
4.2.5 Internetworks
The world collection of computer is called internetworks or internet.
Gateway: it is used to connection between two or more networks
5. Wireless Networks
Wireless networks can be divided into three main categories:
System interconnection- It is interconnecting the components of a computer using short-range
radio.
Some short-range wireless networks called Bluetooth are used to connect these components
without wires.
Wireless LANs are systems in which every computer has a radio modem and antenna with which it
can communicate with other systems.
Wireless WANs.
6. Home Networks
Every device in the home is capable of communicating with every other device, and all of them will
be accessible over the Internet. Some categories are :
Computers (desktop PC).
Entertainment (TV, DVD).
Telecommunications (telephone, mobile telephone).
Appliances (microwave, refrigerator).
Telemetry (utility meter, smoke/burglar alarm).
Home networking has different properties than other network types. These are:
o The network and devices have to be easy to install.
o The network and devices have to be fool proof in operation.
o Low price is essential for success.
o Security and reliability is very important.
7. Network software
7.1Protocol Hierarchies
Networks are organized as a stack of layers or levels, each one built upon the other.
The number of layers, the name of each layer, the contents of each layer, and the function of each
layer differ from network to network.
The purpose of each layer is to offer certain services to the higher
layers. A five-layer network is:
5
The entities comprising the corresponding layers on different machines are called peers. The peers
may be processes, hardware devices, or even human beings.
No data are directly transferred from layer n on one machine to layer n on another machine. Each
layer passes data and control information to the layer immediately below it, until the lowest layer is
reached.
Below layer 1 is the physical medium through which actual communication occurs.
A set of layers and protocols is called a network architecture. A list of protocols used by a certain
system, one protocol per layer, is called a protocol stack.
6
7.3 Service Primitives
A service is specified by a set of primitives available to a user process to access the service. The
primitives are normally system calls of an OS.
Some of the essential primitives:
The server executes LISTEN to indicate that it is prepared to accept incoming connections. After
executing the primitive, the server process is blocked until a request for connection appears.
The client process executes CONNECT to establish a connection with the server. The CONNECT
call needs to specify who to connect to. The operating system sends a packet to the peer asking it
to connect.
When the system sees that the packet is requesting a connection, it checks to see if there is a
listener. If so, it does two things: unblocks the listener and sends back an acknowledgement. The
arrival of this acknowledgement then releases the client.
The server executes RECEIVE to prepare to accept the first request. Then the client executes
SEND to transmit its request followed by the execution of RECEIVE to get the reply.
The client use DISCONNECT to terminate the connection. When the server gets the packet, it also
issues a DISCONNECT of its own, acknowledging the client and releasing the connection.
7.4 Relationship of Services and Protocols
A service is a set of primitives that a layer provides to the layer above it.
The service defines what operations the layer is prepared to perform on behalf of its users, but it
says nothing at all about how these operations are implemented.
A service relates as an interface between two layers, with the lower layer being the service
provider and the upper layer being the service user.
A protocol is a set of rules governing the format and meaning of the packets, or messages that are
exchanged by the peer entities within a layer.
Services relate to the interfaces between layers whereas protocols relate to the packets sent
between peer entities on different machines.
7
8. Reference Models
8.1 The OSI Reference Model
This model is based on a proposal developed by the International Standards Organization (ISO).
It is called the ISO OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) Reference Model because it deals with
connecting open systems that is, systems that are open for communication with other systems.
10
This architecture was later known as the TCP/IP Reference Model, after its two primary protocols.
The relation between OSI and TCP/IP model is:
11
TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), is a reliable connection-oriented protocol that allows a byte
stream originating on one machine to be delivered without error on any other machine in the
internet.
It fragments the incoming byte stream into discrete messages and passes each one on to the
internet layer.
At the destination, the receiving TCP process reassembles the received messages into the output
stream.
UDP (User Datagram Protocol), is an unreliable, connectionless protocol for applications that do
not want TCP's sequencing or flow control and wish to provide their own. The relation of IP,
TCP, and UDP is:
12
The ARPANET
The Internet is not a network, but a vast collection of different networks that use certain
common protocols and provide certain common services.
US created a single defense research organization, ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects
Agency – it had no scientists or laboratories but did its work by issuing grants and contracts
to universities and companies.
DNS
During the 1980s, additional networks, mainly LANs, were connected to the ARPANET.
Finding hosts became increasingly expensive, so DNS (Domain Name System) was created to
organize machines into domains and map host names onto IP addresses.
DNS has become a generalized, distributed database system for storing a variety of information
NSFNET
In 1970s, NSF (the U.S. National Science Foundation) found the major impact of the
ARPANET and designed a successor to the ARPANET that is open to all university research
groups
NSF decided to build a backbone network to connect its six supercomputer centers, in
San Diego, Boulder, Champaign, Pittsburgh, Ithaca, and Princeton
NSF also funded some regional networks that connected to the backbone to allow users at
thousands of universities, research labs, libraries, and museums to access any of the
supercomputers and to communicate with one another.
This complete network was called NSFNET
13
NSF awarded contracts to four different network operators to establish a NAP (Network
Access Point)
During the 1990s, many other countries and regions also built national research networks, often
patterned on the ARPANET and NSFNET. They are Europa NET and EBONE in Europe.
Internet
The number of networks, machines, and users connected to the ARPANET grew rapidly
after TCP/IP became the only official protocol on January 1, 1983
When NSFNET and the ARPANET were interconnected, the growth became exponential. Many
regional networks joined up, and connections were made to networks in Canada, Europe, and
the Pacific
The glue that holds the Internet together is the TCP/IP reference model and TCP/IP protocol
stack
To be on the Internet - a machine is on the Internet if it runs the TCP/IP protocol stack, has
an IP address, and can send IP packets to all the other machines on the Internet.
Up to 1990s, the Internet was largely populated by academic, government, and industrial
researchers.
WWW (World Wide Web) changed all that and brought millions of new, non-academic users to
the net
Architecture of the Internet
14
ISP have POP (Point of Presence), where converted digital signals from the computer to analog
signals (by modem) are removed from the telephone system and injected into the ISP’s regional
network, from this point on, the system is fully digital and packet switched
The ISP's regional network consists of interconnected routers in the various cities the ISP
serves.
If the packet is destined for a host served directly by the ISP, the packet is delivered to the host.
Otherwise, it is handed over to the ISP's backbone operator
Ethernet
Internet and ATM are designed for wide area networking
The most popular LAN is Ethernet
Up to 256 machines could be attached to the system via transceivers screwed onto the cable.
A cable with multiple machines attached to it in parallel is called a multi drop cable
A computer first listened to the cable to see if someone else was already transmitting, the
computer held back until the current transmission finished
Architecture of the original Ethernet.
15
If two or more computers start transmitting at once each computer listens during its
own transmission and if it detects interference, jam the ether to alert all senders
Then the station/computer backs off and waits a random time before retrying
If a second collision happens, the random waiting time is doubled, and so on, to spread out the
competing transmissions and give one of them a chance to go first
In 1978 Xerox drew the 10-Mbps Ethernet standard – became IEEE 802.3 standard in 1983
16
Another problem is that a radio signal can be reflected off solid objects, so it may be
received multiple times (along multiple paths). This interference results in what is called
multipath fading.
17