Computer Networking

Sixth edition

Chapter 5
The Network Layer

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Network Layer Design Issues

• Store-and-forward packet switching

• Services provided to the transport layer
• Implementation of connectionless service
• Implementation of connection-oriented service
• Comparison of virtual-circuit and datagram networks

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Store-and-Forward Packet Switching

The environment of the network layer protocols

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Services Provided to the Transport Layer

• Services independent of router technology

• Transport layer shielded from number, type, topology of
routers
• Network addresses available to transport layer use
uniform numbering plan
– Even across LANs and WANs

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Implementation of Connectionless Service

Routing within a datagram network

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Implementation of Connection-Oriented
Service

Routing within a virtual-circuit network

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Comparison of Virtual-Circuit and
Datagram Networks

Comparison of datagram and virtual-circuit networks

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Routing Algorithms in a Single Network
(1 of 3)

• Optimality principle
• Shortest path algorithm
• Flooding
• Distance vector routing
• Link state routing

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Routing Algorithms in a Single Network
(2 of 3)

• Hierarchical routing within a network

• Broadcast routing
• Multicast routing
• Anycast routing

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Routing Algorithms in a Single Network
(3 of 3)

Network with a conflict between fairness and efficiency

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The Optimality Principle

(a) A network. (b) A sink tree for router B.

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Shortest Path Algorithm (1 of 2)

The first six steps used in computing the shortest path from A to D. The arrows indicate
the working node.

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Shortest Path Algorithm (2 of 2)

Dijkstra’s algorithm to compute the shortest path through a graph

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Distance Vector Routing

(a) A network. (b) Input from A, I, H, K, and the new routing table for J.

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The Count-to-Infinity Problem

The count-to-infinity problem

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Link State Routing

• Discover neighbors, learn network addresses

• Set distance/cost metric to each neighbor
• Construct packet telling all it has learned
• Send packet to, receive packets from other routers
• Compute shortest path to every other router

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Learning about the Neighbors

(a) Nine routers and a broadcast LAN. (b) A graph model of (a).

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Building Link State Packets

(a) A network. (b) The link state packets for this network.

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Distributing the Link State Packets

The packet buffer for router B in Fig. 5-12(a)

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Hierarchical Routing within a Network

Hierarchical routing

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Broadcast Routing

Reverse path forwarding. (a) A network. (b) Sink tree for router I. (c) The tree built by
reverse path forwarding from I.

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Multicast Routing (1 of 2)

(a) A network. (b) A spanning tree for the leftmost router. (c) A multicast tree for group 1.
(d) A multicast tree for group 2.

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Multicast Routing (2 of 2)

(a) Core-based tree for group 1. (b) Sending to group 1.

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Anycast Routing

(a) Anycast routes to group 1. (b) Topology seen by the routing protocol.

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Traffic Management at the Network Layer

• The need for traffic management: congestion

• Approaches to traffic management
– Traffic-aware routing
– Admission control
– Load shedding
– Traffic shaping
– Active queue management
– Random early detection
– Choke packets
– Explicit congestion notification
– Hop-by-hop backpressure

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Congestion

Performance drops significantly in the presence of congestion: packet loss rates

increase, and latency also increases as router queues fill with packets

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Approaches to Traffic Management

Timescales of approaches to traffic and congestion management

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Traffic-Aware Routing

A network in which the East and West parts are connected by two links

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Admission Control

(a) A congested network. (b) The portion of the network that is not congested. A virtual
circuit from A to B is also shown.

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Traffic Shaping (1 of 2)

(a) Shaping packets. (b) A leaky bucket. (c) A token bucket.

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Traffic Shaping (2 of 2)

(a) Traffic from a host. Output shaped by a token bucket of rate 200 Mbps and capacity
(b) 9600 KB and (c) 0 KB. Token bucket level for shaping with rate 200 Mbps and
capacity (d) 16,000 KB, (e) 9600 KB, and (f) 0 KB.

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Explicit Congestion Notification

Explicit congestion notification

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Hop-by-Hop Backpressure

(a) A choke packet that affects only the source. (b) A choke packet that affects each hop
it passes through.
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Quality of Service and Application QoE

• Application QoS requirements

• Overprovisioning
• Packet scheduling
• Integrated services
– RSVP—The Resource reSerVation Protocol

• Differentiated services
– Expedited forwarding
– Assured forwarding

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Application QoS Requirements

Stringency of applications’ quality-of-service requirements

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Categories of QoS and Examples

• Constant bit rate

– Telephony

• Real-time variable bit rate

– Compressed videoconferencing

• Non-real-time variable bit rate

– Watching a movie on demand

• Available bit rate

– File transfer

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Overprovisioning

• Helps to provide good quality of service

– Ensure the network has the capacity for all traffic
– Expensive solution

• Network issues to address for quality of service

– Addressing applications needs
– Regulating traffic entering the network
– Reserving resources at routers to guarantee performance
– Safely accepting more traffic

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Packet Scheduling

• Router resources reserved for different flows

– Bandwidth
– Buffer space
– CPU cycles

• Algorithms
– First-In First-Out (FIFO) scheduling
– Fair queueing
– Weighted fair queueing
– Putting it together

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Fair Queueing (1 of 2)

Round-robin fair queueing

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Fair Queueing (2 of 2)

(a) Weighted Fair Queueing. (b) Finishing times for the packets.

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Putting it Together (1 of 2)

An example flow specification

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Putting it Together (2 of 2)

Bandwidth and delay guarantees with token buckets and WFQ

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Integrated Services (1 of 2)

(a) A network. (b) The multicast spanning tree for host 1. (c) The multicast spanning tree
for host 2.

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 Integrated Services (2 of 2)

(a) Host 3 requests a channel to host 1. (b) Host 3 then requests a second channel, to
host 2. (c) Host 5 requests a channel to host 1.

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Differentiated Services (1 of 2)

Expedited packets experience a traffic-free network

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Differentiated Services (2 of 2)

A possible implementation of assured forwarding

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Internetworking

• Internetworks: an overview
• How networks differ
• Connecting heterogeneous networks
• Connecting endpoints across heterogeneous networks
• Internetwork routing: routing across multiple networks
• Supporting different packet sizes: packet fragmentation

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How Networks Differ

Some of the many ways networks can differ

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Connecting Heterogeneous Networks

(a) A packet crossing different networks. (b) Network and link layer protocol processing.

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Connecting Endpoints Across
Heterogeneous Networks (1 of 2)

Tunneling a packet from Paris to London

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Connecting Endpoints Across
Heterogeneous Networks (2 of 2)

Tunneling a car from France to England

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Supporting Different Packet Sizes: Packet
Fragmentation (1 of 3)

(a) Transparent fragmentation. (b) Nontransparent fragmentation.

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Supporting Different Packet Sizes: Packet
Fragmentation (2 of 3)

Fragmentation when the elementary data size is 1 byte. (a) Original packet, containing 10
data bytes. (b) Fragments after passing through a network with maximum packet size of
8 payload bytes plus header. (c) Fragments after passing through a size 5 gateway.

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Supporting Different Packet Sizes: Packet
Fragmentation (3 of 3)

Path MTU discovery

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Software-Defined Networking

• Overview
• The SDN control plane: logically centralized software
control
• The SDN data plane: programmable hardware
• Programmable network telemetry

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Overview

Control and data plane separation in SDN

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The SDN Data Plane: Programmable
Hardware (1 of 2)

Reconfigurable match-action pipeline for a programmable data plane

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The SDN Data Plane: Programmable
Hardware (2 of 2)

Reconfigurable match-action pipelines on both ingress and egress

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The Network Layer in the Internet (1 of 3)

• Top 10 principles
– Make sure it works
– Keep it simple
– Make clear choices
– Exploit modularity
– Expect heterogeneity
– Avoid static options and parameters
– Look for a good design; it need not be perfect
– Be strict when sending and tolerant when receiving
– Think about scalability
– Consider performance and cost

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The Network Layer in the Internet (2 of 3)

• The IP Version 4 Protocol

• IP Addresses
• IP Version 6
• Internet control protocols
• Label switching and MPLS
• OSPF—An interior gateway routing protocol
• BGP—The exterior gateway routing protocol
• Internet multicasting

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The Network Layer in the Internet (3 of 3)

The Internet is an interconnected collection of many networks.

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The IP Version 4 Protocol (1 of 2)

The IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) header

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The IP Version 4 Protocol (2 of 2)

Some of the IP options

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IP Addresses

• Prefixes
– A contiguous block of IP address space

• Subnets
• CIDR—Classless InterDomain Routing
• Classful and special addressing
• NAT—Network Address Translation

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Prefixes

A prefix and a subnet mask

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Subnets

Splitting an IP prefix into separate networks with subnetting

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CIDR—Classless InterDomain Routing
(1 of 3)

A set of IP address assignments

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CIDR—Classless InterDomain Routing
(2 of 3)

Aggregation of IP prefixes

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CIDR—Classless InterDomain Routing
(3 of 3)

Longest matching prefix routing at the New York router

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Classful and Special Addressing (1 of 2)

IP address formats

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Classful and Special Addressing (2 of 2)

Special IP addresses

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NAT—Network Address Translation

Placement and operation of a NAT box

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IP Version 6 (1 of 3)

• The main IPv6 header

• Extension headers
• Controversies

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IP Version 6 (2 of 3)

• IPv6 major goals

– Support billions of hosts
– Reduce routing table size
– Simplify the protocol
– Provide better security
– Attention to type of service
– Aid multicasting
– Roaming host without changing address
– Allow future protocol evolution
– Permit coexistence of old and new protocols for years

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IP Version 6 (3 of 3)

• IP version 6 improvements
– Longer addresses than IPv4
– Simplification of the header
– Better support for options
– Big advance is in security
– Quality of service

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The Main IPv6 Header

The IPv6 fixed header (required)

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Extension Headers (1 of 3)

IPv6 extension headers

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Extension Headers (2 of 3)

The hop-by-hop extension header for large datagrams (jumbograms)

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Extension Headers (3 of 3)

The extension header for routing

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Internet Control Protocols

• ICMP—The Internet Control Message Protocol

• ARP—The Address Resolution Protocol
• DHCP—The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol

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ICMP—The Internet Control Message
Protocol

The principal ICMP message types

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ARP—The Address Resolution Protocol

Two switched Ethernet LANs joined by a router

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Label Switching and MPLS (1 of 3)

• MPLS (MultiProtocol Label Switching)

– Perilously close to circuit switching
– Adds a label in front of each packet
– Forwards based on the label (not the destination address)
– Forwarding can be done very quickly

• New MPLS header is added in front of the IP header

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Label Switching and MPLS (2 of 3)

Transmitting a TCP segment using IP, MPLS, and PPP

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Label Switching and MPLS (3 of 3)

Forwarding an IP packet through an MPLS network

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OSPF—An Interior Gateway Routing
Protocol (1 of 4)

• Intradomain routing
– IGP (Interior Gateway Protocol)

• RIP (Routing Information Protocol)

– Works well in small systems

• OSPF (Open Shortest Path First)

– Widely used in company networks

• IS-IS (Intermediate-System to Intermediate-System)

– Widely used in ISP networks

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OSPF—An Interior Gateway Routing
Protocol (2 of 4)

• OSPF
– Published in the open literature
– Supports a variety of distance metrics
– Dynamic
– Supports routing based on type of service
– Performs load balancing, splitting the load over multiple lines
– Supports hierarchical systems
– Provides security
– Provision for dealing with routers that were connected to the
Internet via a tunnel

• OSPF supports multiaccess networks

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OSPF—An Interior Gateway Routing
Protocol (3 of 4)

(a) An autonomous system. (b) A graph representation of (a).

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OSPF—An Interior Gateway Routing
Protocol (4 of 4)

The five types of OSPF messages

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BGP—The Exterior Gateway Routing
Protocol (1 of 3)

• Possible routing constraints

– Do not carry commercial traffic on the educational network
– Never send traffic from the Pentagon on a route through Iraq
– Use TeliaSonera instead of Verizon because it is cheaper
– Don’t use AT&T in Australia because performance is poor
– Traffic starting or ending at Apple should not transit Google

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BGP—The Exterior Gateway Routing
Protocol (2 of 3)

Routing policies between four autonomous systems

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BGP—The Exterior Gateway Routing
Protocol (3 of 3)

Propagation of BGP route advertisements

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Interdomain Traffic Engineering

• Tune parameters and configuration network protocols to

manage utilization and congestion
• Inbound traffic engineering
– Selects routes to control how traffic enters the network
– Set the local preference attribute for individual routes
– Use AS path prepending
– Leverage longest prefix match
▪ Split a prefix into multiple smaller (longer) prefixes, so that upstream routers
prefer the routes with longer prefixes

• Outbound traffic engineering

– How traffic leaves the network

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Internet Multicasting

• Internet multicasting
– One-to-many communication using class D IP addresses

• Each class D address identifies a group of hosts

• Twenty-eight bits available for identifying groups
– Over 250 million groups can exist at the same time

• Process sends a packet to a class D address

– Best-effort attempt is made to deliver it to all the members of the
group addressed, but no guarantees are given

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