Chapter 3

(Week 5)

The Data Link Layer

ANDREW S. TANENBAUM
COMPUTER NETWORKS
FOURTH EDITION
PP. 183-211

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 Previous Layer: The Physical Layer
• The physical layer is concerned with
transmitting raw bits over a communication
channel.

Next Layer: The Data Link Layer

• The main task of the data link layer is to
transform a raw transmission facility into a line
that appears free of undetected transmission
errors to the network layer.

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 Data Link Layer (1/5)
• We will study the design principles
for layer 2, the data link layer.

• This study deals the algorithms for

achieving reliable, efficient
communication between two
adjacent machines at the data link
layer
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 Data Link Layer (2/5)
• Why Data Link Layer?
• You might think this problem is so
trivial that there is no software to
study – machine A just puts the bits
on the wire, and machine B just
takes them off.
• Unfortunately, communication
circuits make errors occasionally.
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 Data Link Layer (3/5)
• Machines have only a finite data
rate, and there is a nonzero
propagation delay between the time
a bit is sent and the time it is
received.
• These limitations have important
implications for the efficiency of the
data transfer.
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 Data Link Layer (4/5)
• The protocols used for
communication must take all these
factors into consideration.
• These protocols are the subject of
this chapter.

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 Data Link Layer (5/5)
Objectives:
1) An introduction to the key design issues
present in the data link layer;
2) A study of protocols by looking at the nature
of errors, their causes, and how they can be
detected and corrected;
3) A study of increasingly complex protocols,
each one solving more and more of the
problems present in this layer;
4) An examination of protocol modeling and
correctness.
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Data Link Layer Design Issues (1/4)
The data link layer’s specific functions:

• Providing a well-defined service interface to

the network layer
• Dealing with transmission errors
• Regulating the flow of data so that slow
receivers are not swamped by fast senders.

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Data Link Layer Design Issues (2/4)
• The data link layer takes the packets it gets
from the network layer and encapsulates them
into the frames for transmission.
• Each frame consists of a frame header, a
payload field for holding the packet, and a
frame trailer.
• Frame management forms the heart of what the
data link layer does.

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Data Link Layer Design Issues (3/4)

Relationship between packets and frames.

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Data Link Layer Design Issues (4/4)
Subtopics:

• Services Provided to the Network Layer

• Framing
• Error Control
• Flow Control

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Services Provided to Network Layer (1/8)
• The principal service is transferring data from
the network layer on the source machine to
the network layer on the destination machine.
• The job of the data link layer is to transmit
the bits to the destination machine so they can
be handed over to the network layer.

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Services Provided to Network Layer (2/8)

(a) Virtual communication. (b) Actual communication.

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Services Provided to Network Layer (3/8)
The data link layer can be designed to offer
various services.
a)Unacknowledged connectionless service.
b)Acknowledged connectionless service.
c)Acknowledged connection-oriented service.

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Services Provided to Network Layer (4/8)
a) Unacknowledged connectionless service:
•The source machine sends independent frames to
the destination machines without having the
destination machine acknowledge them.
•No logical connection is established beforehand
or released afterward.
•If a frame is lost due to noise on the line, no
attempt is made to detect the loss or recover from
it in the data link layer.
•It is used where error rate is very low, for real-
time traffic such as voice, most LANs use it.
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Services Provided to Network Layer (5/8)
b) Acknowledged connectionless service:
•Reliable connectionless service
•When this service is offered, there are still no
logical connections used, but each frame sent is
individually acknowledged.
•In this way, the sender knows whether a frame
has arrived correctly.
•If it has not arrived within a specified time
interval, it can be sent again.
•For unreliable channels, such as wireless systems.
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Services Provided to Network Layer (6/8)
c) Acknowledged connection-oriented service.
• The source and destination machines establish a
connection before and data are transferred.
• Each frame sent over the connection is
numbered, and the data link layer guarantees
that each frame sent is indeed received.
• Furthermore, it guarantees that each frame is
received exactly once and that all frames are
received in the right order.

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Services Provided to Network Layer (7/8)
c) Acknowledged connection-oriented service.
There are three distinct phases in connection-
oriented service.
• The connection is established;
• Frames are transmitted by this connection;
• The connection is released.

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 Services Provided to Network Layer (8/8)
Example: A WAN subnet consisting of routers connected by point-to-
point leased telephone lines..

Placement of the data link protocol.

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 Framing (1/12)
• To provide service to the network layer, the data
link layer must use the service provided to it by
the physical layer.
• What the physical layer does is accept a row bit
stream and attempt to deliver it to the
destination.
• The number of bits received may be less than,
equal to, or more than the number of bits
transmitted, an they may have different values.
• It is up to the data link layer to detect and, if
necessary, correct errors.
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 Framing (2/12)
• The usual approach is for the data link layer to
break the bit stream up into discrete frames and
compute the checksum for each frame.
• When a frame arrives at the destination, the
checksum is recomputed.
• If the newly – computed checksum is different
from the one contained in the frame, the data
link layer knows that an error has occurred and
takes steps to deal with it.
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 Framing (3/12)
The methods to break the bit stream up into
frames:
1) Character count;
2) Flag bytes with byte stuffing;
3) Starting and ending flags, with bit stuffing;
4) Physical layer coding violations.

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 Framing (4/12)
1) Character count:
• This framing method uses a field in the header
to specify the number of characters in the frame.
• When the data link layer at the destination sees
the character count, it knows how many
characters follow and hence where the end of
the frame is.
• The trouble with this algorithm is that the count
can be garbled by a transmission error.
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 Framing (5/12)

A character stream. (a) Without errors for four frames of sizes 5, 5,8,
and 8 characters, respectively. (b) With one error.
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 Framing (6/12)
2) Flag bytes with byte stuffing.
• This method gets around the problem of
resynchronization after an error by having each
frame start and end with special bytes.
• The starting and ending Flag Bytes are same in
recent years.
• If the receiver ever loses synchronization, it can
just search for the flag byte to find the end of
the current frame.
• 2 consecutive flag bytes indicate the end of one
frame and start of next one.
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 Framing (7/12)

(a) A frame delimited by flag bytes.

(b) Four examples of byte sequences before and after stuffing.
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 Framing (8/12)
2) Flag bytes with byte stuffing – cont.
• A serious problem occurs with this method when
binary data, such as object programs or floating-
point numbers, are being transmitted.
• It may easily happen that the flag byte’s bit pattern
occurs in the data.
• This situation will usually interfere with the
framing.
• One way to solve this problem is to have the
sender’s data link layer insert a special escape byte
(ESC) just before each “accidental” flag byte in the
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 Framing (9/12)
2) Flag bytes with byte stuffing – cont.
• A major disadvantage of using this framing method
is that it is closely tied to the use of 8-bit characters.
• Not all character code use 8-bit characters.
• For example, UNICODE uses 16-bit characters.
• As networks developed, the disadvantages of
embedding the character code length in the framing
mechanism became more and more obvious, so a
new technique had to be developed to allow
arbitrary sized characters.
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 Framing (10/12)
3. Starting and ending flags, with bit stuffing:
• The new technique allows data frames to contain an
arbitrary number of bits and allows character codes
with an arbitrary number of bits per character.
• Each frame begins and ends with a special bit
pattern, 0111110 (in fact, a flag byte).
• Whenever the sender’s data link layer encounters
five consecutive 1s in the data, it automatically
stuffs a 0 bit into the outgoing bit stream.

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 Framing (11/12)

Bit stuffing
(a) The original data.
(b) The data as they appear on the line.
(c) The data as they are stored in receiver’s memory after destuffing.
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 Framing (12/12)
4) Physical layer coding violations:
• This method is only applicable to networks in
which the encoding on the physical medium
contains some redundancy.
• For example, some LANs encode 1 bit of data by
using 2 physical bits.
• Normally, a 1 bit is a high-low pair and a 0 bit is a
low-high pair.
• 11 or 00 are not used for data but are used for
delimiting frames in some protocols.
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 Error Control (1/1)
• The usual way to ensure reliable delivery is to
provide the sender with some feedback about what
is happening at the other end of the line.
• Typically, the protocol calls for the receiver to send
back special control frames.
• If the sender receives a positive acknowledgement
about a frame, it knows the frame has arrived
safely.
• On the other hand, a negative acknowledgement
means that something has gone wrong, and the
frame must be transmitted
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 Flow Control (1/2)
•Another important design issue that occurs in the data
link layer (and higher layers as well) is what to do
with a sender that systematically wants to transmit
frames faster than the receiver can accept them.
•To solve this problem feedback-based flow control
and rate-based flow control are used.

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 Flow Control (2/2)
•Feedback-based flow control: the receiver sends back
information to the sender giving it permission to send
more data or at least telling the sender how the
receiver is doing.
•Rate-based flow control: the protocol has a built-in
mechanism that limits the rate at which senders may
transmit data, without using feedback from the
receiver.
•Rate-based flow control is never used in the data link
layer.
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 Error Detection and Correction (1/5)
• The telephone system has three parts:
1) the switches – almost entirely digital
2) the interoffice trunks - almost entirely digital
3) the local loops – still analog (twisted copper
pairs)

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 Error Detection and Correction (2/5)
• While errors are rare on the digital part, they
are still common on the local loops.
• Furthermore, wireless communication is
becoming more common, and the error rates
here are orders of magnitude worse than on
the interoffice fiber trunks.
• The conclusion is: transmission errors are
going to be with us for many years to come.
• We have to learn how to deal with them.
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 Error Detection and Correction (3/5)
• As a result of the physical processes that
generate them, errors on some media (e.g.,
radio) tend to come in bursts rather than
singly.
• The advantage of bursts errors is that the
computer data are always sent in blocks of
bits.
• The disadvantage is that they are much
harder to correct than are isolated errors.
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Error Detection and Correction (4/5)
• Error-Correcting Codes
To include enough redundant information along
with each block of data sent, to enable the
receiver to deduce what the transmitted data
must have been.
• Error-Detecting Codes
To include only enough redundancy to allow the
receiver to deduce that an error occurred, but
not which error, and have it request a
retransmission.
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Error Detection and Correction (5/5)
• On channels that are highly reliable, such as
fiber, it is cheaper to use an error detecting
code and just retransmit the occasional block
found to be faulty.
• On channels such as wireless links that make
many errors, it is better to add enough
redundancy to each block for the receiver to be
able to figure out what the original block was,
rather than relying on a retransmission, which
itself may be in error.
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 Error-Correcting Codes (1/11)
• What is an error?
• Normally, a frame consists of m data bits and r
redundant, or check, bits.
• The total length is n (n=m+r)
• An n-bit unit containing data and check bits is
often referred to as an n-bit codeword.

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 Error-Correcting Codes (2/11)
• Given any two codeword (say, 10001001 and
10110001), it is possible to determine how many
corresponding bits differ. As we see in this case 3
bits differ.
• To determine how many bits differ, just exclusive
OR the two codewords and count the number of 1
bits in the result, for example:
• 10001001
• 10110001
• ------------
• 00111000

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 Error-Correcting Codes (3/11)
• The number of bit positions in which two
codewords differ is called the Hamming distance.
• Its significance is that if two codewords are a
Hamming distance d apart, it will require d single-
bit errors to convert one into the other.

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 Error-Correcting Codes (4/11)
• 2m possible data message are legal;
• But due to the way the check bits are computed,
not all of the 2n possible codewords are used.
• It is possible to constract a complete list of legal
codewords by given algorithm for computing the
check bits, and from this find the two codewords
whose Hamming distance is minimum.
• This distance is the Hamming distance of the
complete code.
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 Error-Correcting Codes (5/11)
• The error-detecting and error –correcting
properties of a code depend on its Hamming
distance.
• To detect d errors, you need a distance d+1 code
because with such a code there is no way that d
single-bit errors can change a valid codeword.
• When the receiver sees an invalid codeword, it
can tell that a transmission error has occurred.

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 Error-Correcting Codes (6/11)
• Similarly, to correct d errors, you need a distance
2d+1 code because that way the legal codewords
are so far apart that even with d changes, the
original codeword is still closer than any other
codeword, so it can be uniquely determined.
• As a simple example of an error-detecting code,
consider a code in which a single parity bit is
appended to the data.
• The parity bit is chosen so that the number of 1
bits in the codeword is even (or odd).
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 Error-Correcting Codes (7/11)
• For example, when 1011010 is sent in even parity,
a bit is added to the end to make it 10110100.
• With odd parity 1011010 becomes 10110101.
• A code with a single parity bit has a distance 2,
since any single-bit error produces a codeword
with the wrong parity.
• It can be used to detect single errors.

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 Error-Correcting Codes (8/11)
• Example:
• Consider a code with only four valid codewords:
• 0000000000,0000011111,1111100000,1111111111
• This code has a distance 5, which means that it can
correct double errors, because of 5=2d+1.
• If codeword 0000000111 arrives, the receiver knows
that the original must have been 0000011111.
• If however a triple error changes 0000000000 into
0000000111, the error will not be corrected properly.
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 Error-Correcting Codes (9/11)
• Imaging that we want to design a code with m
message bits and r check bits that will allow all
single errors to be corrected.
• Each of the 2m legal message has n illegal codewords
at a distance 1 from it.
• These are formed by systematically inverting each of
the n bits in the n-bit codeword formed from it.
• Thus each of 2m legal messages requires n+1 bit
patterns dedicated to it.
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 Error-Correcting Codes (10/11)
• Since the total number of bit patterns is 2n, we must
have (n+1)2m≤2n.
• Using n=m+r, this requirement becomes
(m+r+1) ≤2r.
• Given m, this puts a lower limit on the number of
check bits needed to correct single errors.

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Error-Correcting Codes (11/11)

Use of a Hamming code to correct burst errors.

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 Error-Detecting Codes (1/10)
• Error correcting codes are widely used on wireless
links, which are noisy and error prone when
compared to copper wire or optical fibers.
• Without error correcting codes, it would be hard to
get anything through.
• However over copper wire or fiber, the error rate is
much lower, so error detection and retransmission is
usually more efficient there for dealing with the
occasional error.
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 Error-Detecting Codes (2/10)
• Example:
• Consider a channel on which errors are isolated and
the error rate is 10-6 per bit.
• Let the block size be 1000 bits.
• To provide error correction for 1000-bit block, 10
check bits are needed: a megabit of data would
require 10,000 check bits.
• To merely detect a block with a single 1-bit error,
one parity bit per block will suffice.
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 Error-Deecting Codes (3/10)
• Example (cont.):
• Once every 1000 blocks, an extra block (1001 bits)
will have to be transmitted.
• The total overhead for the error detection +
retransmission method is only 2001 bits per megabit
of data, versus 10,000 bits for a Hamming code.

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 Error-Detecting Codes (4/10)
• The polynomial code or CRC (Cyclic Redundancy
Check) is in widespread use;
• Polynomial codes are based upon treating bit strings
as representations of polynomials with coefficients
of 0 and 1 only.
• A k-bit frame is regarded as the coefficient list for a
polynomial with k terms, ranging from xk-1 to x0.
• Such a polynomial is said to be of degree k-1.
• For example: 110001 is x5+x4+x0
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 Error-Detecting Codes (5/10)
• Polynomial arithmetic is done modulo 2, according
to the rules of algebraic field theory.
• There are no carries for addition or borrows for
subtraction.
• Both addition and subtraction are identical to
exclusive OR. For example:
• 10011011 00110011 11110000 01010101
• +11001010 +11001101 -101001101 -10101111
• -------------------- -------------------- ----------------------- --------------------

• 01010001 1111110 01010110 11111010

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 Error-Detecting Codes (6/10)
• When the polynomial code method is employed, the sender
and receiver must agree upon a generator polynomial, G(x),
in advance.
• Both high- and low- order bits of the generator must be 1.
• To compute the checksum for some frame with m bits,
corresponding to the polynomial M(x), the frame must be
longer than the generator polynomial.
• The idea is to append a checksum to the end of the frame in
such a way that the polynomial represented by the
checksummed frame is divisible by G(x).
• When the receiver gets the checksummed frame, it tries
dividing it by G(x).
• If there is a remainder, there has been a transmission error.
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 Error-Detecting Codes (7/10)
• The algorithm for computing the checksum is as follows:
1) Let r be the degree of G(x). Append r zero bits to the low-
order end of the frame so it now contains m+r bits and
corresponds to the polynomial xrM(x).
2) Divide the bit string corresponding to G(x) into the bit
string corresponding to xrM(x), using modulo 2 division.
3) Subtract the remainder (which is always r or fewer bits)
from the bit string corresponding to xrM(x) using modulo 2
subtraction. The result is te checksummed frame to be
transmitted. Call its polynomial T(x).

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 Error-Detecting Codes (8/10)

This example illustrates the

calculation for a frame
M(t)= 1101011011 using
the generator
G(x)=x4+x+1. r=4
xrM(x)=11010110110000
T(x)=11010110111110
E(x) is error polynomial

Calculation of the
polynomial code
checksum. BLM431 Computer Networks 58
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 Error-Detecting Codes (9/10)
• What kinds of errors will be detected?
• Imaging that a transmission error occurs, so that
instead of the bit string for T(x) arriving, T(x)+E(x)
arrives.
• Each 1 bit in E(x) corresponds to a bit that has been
inverted.
• If there are k 1 bits in E(x), k single-bit errors have
occurred.
• A single burst error is characterized by an initial 1, a
mixture of 0s and 1s, and a final 1, with all other bits
being 0. BLM431 Computer Networks 59
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 Error-Detecting Codes (10/10)
• Upon receiving the checksummed frame, the
receiver divides it by G(x); that is, it computes
[T(x)+E(x)]/G(x).
• T(x)/G(x) is 0, so the result of the computation is
simply E(x)/G(x).
• Those errors that happen to correspond to
polynomials containing G(x) as a factor will slip by;
all other errors will be caught.

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