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58 views7 pages

Final sp01

Uploaded by

elhocine
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Stanford University

Computer Science Department


CS 444N M. Baker
Exam Spring 2001

CS 444N Exam
Name:_______________________________________________________________

This is a closed-book examination (i.e. no assistance from textbooks, notes, other people,
etc.) You have 1 hour and 15 minutes to answer as many questions as possible. Write all of
your answers directly on this paper. Make your answers as concise as possible. (You
needn’t cover every available nano-acre with writing.)

Stanford University Honor Code:

In accordance with both the letter and spirit of the Honor Code, I didn’t cheat on this exam.

Signature:____________________________________________________________

Problem Points Score


1 15
2 15
3 15
4 15
5 (extra credit) 5
Total 60

CS 444N Exam Page 1 of 7


Spring 2001
Problem 1: (15 points)

Without a “primary server,” Bayou provides only a partial ordering over updates in the
system. A primary server is needed for total ordering of updates to a database across all
hosts in the system.

a) Why can’t a total ordering be provided without a primary server?

b) What is the purpose of providing this total ordering rather than just a partial
ordering?

c) What is the disadvantage for a system like Bayou of requiring the existence of a
primary server?

CS 444N Exam Page 2 of 7


Spring 2001
Problem 2: (15 points)

Two big issues for TCP in a wireless environment are 1) fluctuations and shrinkage of the
window size, and 2) coarse-grain timeouts.

a) What are the causes of each of these problems?

b) Specifically, how does each problem affect the connection’s performance?

c) Explicit loss notification and selective acknowledgements have been proposed to


tackle these problems. What do these techniques do, and which problem or
problems does each technique address?

CS 444N Exam Page 3 of 7


Spring 2001
Problem 3: (15 points)

Mobile IP was intended to work with legacy correspondent hosts and legacy applications.
However, some advantages may be gained if correspondent hosts are aware of mobility in
certain ways.

a) If a correspondent host is able to do IP-in-IP decapsulation, it may be able to


communicate more efficiently with the mobile host despite the presence of ingress
filtering. Why?

b) If a correspondent host is able to do IP-in-IP encapsulation, it may be able to


communicate more efficiently with the mobile host than is possible with standard
Mobile IP. Why?

c) If a correspondent host is able, someplace beneath the application level, to


maintain a mapping between a mobile host’s local IP address and its home IP
address, and receive updates to that mapping from the mobile host, it may be able
to communicate more efficiently with the mobile host than is possible with
standard Mobile IP. Why?

CS 444N Exam Page 4 of 7


Spring 2001
Problem 4: (15 points)

Transformational proxies have emerged as one popular way to access Internet content
from "small glass" or "thin" clients. The proxy approach is motivated by the following
assumptions (among others):

(i) Clients are underpowered (CPU, memory) compared to their desktop counterparts.
For example, in Top Gun Wingman (Fox et al.), the client-side "browser" is a much
simpler program that doesn't understand HTML at all and doesn't do its own page layout -
it relies on the proxy for everything.

(ii) The network connecting the client to the proxy is much slower than the network
connecting the proxy to the rest of the Internet. For example, one of the earliest uses of
image distillation was to compensate for slow 'last mile' links.

a) Suppose assumption (i) is relaxed. That is, in five years it will be realistic to have
thin clients whose CPU speed and memory are comparable to those of today's
desktop PC's, but wireless access is still slow. How would this affect the design
of a proxy-based system for Internet access, or would it render such a system
obsolete?

CS 444N Exam Page 5 of 7


Spring 2001
b) Suppose assumption (ii) is relaxed. That is, in five years, wide-area wireless
bandwidth will be comparable to cable modem today (several hundred Kbits/sec)
and will be available essentially everywhere, but thin clients are still relatively
underpowered compared to desktop PC's. How would this affect the design of a
proxy-based system for Internet access, or would it render such a system
obsolete?

c) Suppose both assumptions are relaxed. Is there anything compelling left for a
proxy to do, or have they become obsolete?

CS 444N Exam Page 6 of 7


Spring 2001
Problem 5: (5 points extra credit)

When a mobile host switches to a new host network, its IP address changes. At what
level or levels of the system do you think such a name change should be handled (link
layer, network layer, transport layer, middleware layer, application layer, user layer)?

In general, how transparent or not transparent do you think name changes and other
mobility issues (adaptation to bandwidth changes, etc.) should be to the application? To
the user?

CS 444N Exam Page 7 of 7


Spring 2001

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