Chapter 1.

Introduction to Data
Communications

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 Chapter 1. Learning Objectives
• Be aware of the history of communications,
information systems and the Internet
• Be aware of the applications of data communications
networks
• Be familiar with the major components of and types
of networks
• Understand the role of network layers
• Be familiar with the role of network standards
• Be aware of three key trends in communications and
networking
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 Chapter 1. Outline
• Introduction: The Information Society
• Brief histories of:
– communications, info systems and the Internet
• Data Communications Networks
– network components, network types
• Network Models
– OSI model, Internet model, message transmission using layers
• Network Standards
– importance of standards, standards making, common standards
• Future Trends
– pervasive networking, integration of voice, video, and data, new
information services

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Introduction: The Information
Society

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 The Information Age
• Human economic activity can be divided
into three broad epochs:
– 1. The long period in which agricultural and
other types of subsistence activities dominated
– 2. The period since the industrial revolution (ca.
1780) in which machines began to replace
human labor
– 3. The “Information Age” in which human
activities are increasingly dependent on the
storage and flow of vast amounts of
information.

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 Information Economics
• Historically, we can say that economic activity is due
to the effects of three factors:
– 1. Land
– 2. Labor (strategic preindustrial resource)
– 3. Capital (strategic resource of the industrial age)
• With the rise of information technologies,
information must now be viewed as a fourth,
strategically important economic factor.
• Information is used to determine how the other three
factors are best allocated and has value in and of
itself.
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 The Collapsing Information Lag
• Electronic communications has greatly sped up the
rate of transmission of information, beginning with
the telegraph in the 1840s.
• Information that took days or weeks to be transmitted
during the 1700s could be transmitted in minutes or
hours by 1900.
• Today, telecommunications networks transmit huge
quantities of information in a fraction of a second.
• In fact, the growth of telecommunications and
especially computer networks has been the strongest
contributor to the globalization phenomenon we are
experiencing today.
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A Brief History of Information
Systems

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 A Brief History of Information
Systems
• 1950s: Batch processing mainframes
• 1960s: Data communications over phone lines
became common and mainframes became multi-
user systems
• 1970s: Online real-time, transaction oriented
systems replaced batch processing. DBMSs
become common
• 1980s: The PC revolution
• 1990s: PC LANs become common
• 2000: Networking everywhere
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A Brief History of The Internet

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 Internet Milestones
• Originally called ARPANET, the Internet began in
1969 as a military-academic network in the US
(originally 4 nodes).
• 1983, Milnet (for military) split off. Internet is used for
academic, education and research purposes only
• 1986 NSFNet created as US Internet backbone
• Early 1990s, commercial access to the Internet begins.
Government funding of the backbone ends in 1994.
• As of early 2001, the Internet had an estimated 40
million servers and 400 million users. Growth in the
use of the Internet continues at a rapid rate
(see cyberatlas.internet.com)
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 Internet Domain Names
• Format = computer name(s) + domain name:
computer.domain or computer.computer.domain
• Domain names are strictly controlled to prevent
duplication
• Initially, when the Internet existed exclusively in
the US, six top level domains were available:
.edu, .com, .gov, .mil, .org and .net
• As the Internet has become a global network,
international top level domains have been added
using two letter country codes such as:
.ca, .au, .uk, .de
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Data Communications Networks

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 Datacom Basics
• Data Communications: the movement of computer
information from one point to another by means of
electrical or optical transmission systems (called
networks).
• Telecommunications: broader term that includes the
transmission of voice and video, as well as data, and
may imply longer distances.
• Although once considered separate phenomenon,
telecom & datacom are in the process of “converging”
into a single “broadband” communications technology.
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 Network Components
• Local area networks contain three basic hardware
components (see Figure 1-1):
– Servers (also called hosts or host computers)
– Clients
– Circuits
• Clients and Servers typically work together in client-
server networks. Networks without servers are called
peer-to-peer networks.
• Routers are specialized devices responsible for moving
information between networks, are also a common
network component.
• Server types: file servers, print servers, Web servers, e-
mail and directory servers.
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Figure 1-1. Components of a Network 16
 Network Types (Figure 1-2)
• A common way of thinking about networks is by the
scale of the network. 3 common network types are:
– Local Area Networks (LANs) which typically occupy a room
or building, usually include a group of PCs that share a circuit.
– Backbone Networks, have a scale of a few hundred meters to a
few kilometers. Include a high speed backbone linking the
LANs at various locations.
– Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) which typically have a
scale of a few kilometers to a few tens of kilometers &
connects LANs and BNs at different locations, often using
leased lines or other commercial services to transmit data.
– Wide Area Networks (WANs) have a scale of hundreds or
thousands of kilometers. Like MANs, leased circuits or other
commercially available services are used to transmit data.
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Figure 1-2. Network Types by Scale 18
 Intranets and Extranets
• Intranets are networks that have been set
up so that Web sites or other applications
can be used over private networks.
• Extranets also use Internet technology by
providing customer access to secure
corporate Web sites. Extranet access is
usually controlled using passwords, but
newer technologies such as smart cards are
also being used.

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Network Models

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 Multi-layer Network Models
• The process of transferring a message
between sender and receiver is more easily
implemented by breaking it down into
simpler components.
• Instead of a single layer, a group of layers
are used, dividing up the tasks required for
network communications.
• The two most important such network
models are the OSI and Internet models.
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The OSI Networking Reference Model
• Stands for Open Systems Interconnection
• Created by the International Standards
Organization (ISO) as a framework for
computer network standards
• Released in 1984, the model has 7 layers
(see Figure 1-3).

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 The OSI 7-layer Model
Application: provides a set of utilities used by application
programs
Presentation: formats data for presentation to the user, provides
data interfaces, data compression and translation between
different data formats
Session: responsible for initiating, maintaining and terminating
each logical session between sender and receiver
Transport: deals with end-to-end issues such as segmenting the
message for network transport, and maintaining the logical
connections between sender and receiver
Network: responsible for making routing decisions
Data Link: deals with message delineation, error control and
network medium access control
Physical: defines how individual bits are formatted to be
transmitted through the network
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 The Internet (TCP/IP) Protocol Suite
• Stands for Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet
Protocol. Used on the Internet.
• TCP/IP’s 5 layer suite was developed to solve to
the problem of internetworking
• Network layers can also be placed in three groups:
– application layer (includes the application layer),
– internetwork layer (includes the transport and
network layers)
– hardware layer (includes the data link and physical
layers).
• See Figure 1-3.

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 The Internet’s 5-Layer Model
Application: used by application program
Transport: responsible for establishing end-to-end
connections, translates domain names into
numeric addresses and segments messages
Network*: responsible for end-to-end addressing
and routing, determines destination address if
unknown
Data Link*: deals with message delineation, error
control & network access
Physical*: defines how information will be
transmitted through the network
*same as corresponding layer in OSI model 25
Figure 1-3: Network Models 26
 Message Transmission Using Layers
(Figure 1-4)
• Network model layers use protocols, i.e., sets of rules
to define how to communicate at each layer and how
to interface with adjacent layers.
• Generally, messages travel down all network layers.
• When a message is sent to the next layer, that layer
places it in an envelope and adds addressing
information related to that layer.
• At the receiving end, messages travels up through the
network layers, each layer removing the envelopes
added when the message was sent.
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Fig. 1-4 Message transmission using layers 28
 Networking Example: clicking on a
WWW hyperlink
• Clicking on a hyperlink starts an HTTP request-response
cycle. First, the user’s browser sends an HTTP request.
• The HTTP request is then handed to the transport layer’s TCP
protocol and placed in a TCP segment.
• The TCP segment is placed in an IP (network layer) packet.
• The IP packet is next placed in a Data Link layer (such as
Ethernet) frame and sent out over the network media as a
series of 1s and 0s defined by the physical layer.
• On the web server, this process occurs in reverse, each layer
removing the overhead information added by each layer until
the HTTP request is finally produced for the server to read.
• The server then sends an HTTP response back to the client
which is sent back to the user’s browser.
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Network Standards

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 Why Standards?
• Standards provide a fixed way for hardware
and/or software systems to communicate.
• For example, USB enables two pieces of
equipment to interface even though they are
manufactured by different companies.
• By allowing hardware and software from
different companies to interconnect,
standard help promote competition.

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 Types of Standards
• There are two main types of standards:
• Formal: a standard developed by an industry
or government standards-making body
• De facto: standards that emerge in the
marketplace and are widely used, but lack
official backing by a standards-making body

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The Standardization Processes Three Steps
• Specification: developing the nomenclature
and identifying the problems to be
addressed.
• Identification of choices: identify solutions
to the problems and choose the “optimum”
solution.
• Acceptance: defining the solution, getting it
recognized by industry so that a uniform
solution is accepted.
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 Some Major Standards Making Bodies
• ISO: International Organization for Standardization
(www.iso.ch)
• ITU-T: International Telecommunications Union –
Telecom Group (www.itu.int)
• ANSI: American National Standards Institute
(www.ansi.org)
• IEEE: Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
(see standards.ieee.org)
• IETF: Internet Engineering Task Force (www.ietf.org)

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 Layer Common Standards
5. Application layer HTTP, HTML (Web)
MPEG, H.323 (audio/video)
IMAP, POP (e-mail)

4. Transport layer TCP (Internet)

SPX (Novell LANs)
3. Network layer IP (Internet)
IPX (Novell LANs)
2. Data link layer Ethernet (LAN)
PPP (dial-up via modem)
1. Physical layer RS-232c cable (LAN)
Category 5 twisted pair (LAN)
V.92 (56 kbps modem)

Fig. 1-5. Some data communications standards

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Future Trends

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Three Emerging Trends in Networking

• Pervasive Networking
• The Integration of Voice, Video and Data
• New Information Services

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 Pervasive Networking
• The pervasive networking means:
– network use will continue to grow
exponentially
– network access is everywhere
– many new types of devices will have network
capability
• Data rates for all kinds of networking will
also continue to grow exponentially,
reaching Gigabit per second ranges later in
this decade (see Figure 1-6)

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Figure 1-6: Relative Capacities of telephone,
LAN, BN, WAN, and Internet circuits. 39
The Integration of Voice, Video & Data

• Also called convergence, integration means that

telecom systems that were previously transmitted
using separate networks will merge into a single,
high speed, multimedia network in the near future.
• The first step is the integration of voice and data,
which is already underway.
• Later, video will merge with voice and data. This
step will take longer partly due to the high data
rates required for video.

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 New Information Services
• With the World Wide Web, many new
types of information services becoming
available.
• Another trend is the growth of Application
Service Providers (ASPs) that develop
systems for companies, such as providing
and operating a payroll system for a
company that does not have one of its own.
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End of Chapter 1

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