MODULE 3

Network Layer
NETWORKING AND INTERNETWORKING DEVICES

Network
• Two or more devices connected for the purpose of sharing data or resources can form
a network.

• Two issues with LAN :

1. A LAN may need to cover more distance than its media can handle effectively.
• A device called repeater or regenerator is inserted into the network to increase the
coverable distance.
2. Number of stations may be too great for efficient frame delivery or management of
the network, and the network may need to be subdivided
• A device called bridge is inserted for traffic management.
Internetwork
• When two or more separate networks are connected for exchanging data or
resources, they become an internetwork.
– Linking a number of LANs into an internet requires additional internetworking
devices called routers and gateways.
• Networking and internetworking devices are divided into four categories:
• Bridges
• Repeaters
• Routers
• Gateways
Interaction with protocols at different layers of the OSI model.
• Repeaters act only upon the electrical components of a signal and are therefore active
only at physical layer.
• Bridges utilize addressing protocols and can effect flow control of a single LAN;
they are most active at the data link layer.
• Routers provide links between two separate but same type LANs and are most active
at the network layer.
• Gateways provide translation service between incompatible LANs or applications
and are active in all of the layers.
REPEATERS
• A repeater or regenerator is an electronic device that operates on only the physical
layer of the OSI model.
• A repeater installed on a link receives the signal before it becomes too weak or
corrupted, regenerates the original bit pattern, and puts the refreshed copy back onto
the link.
• It amplifies (boost up signal) or regenerates (reconstruct weak signal) the signal.
• A repeater allows us to extend only the physical length of a network.
• The location of a repeater on a link is vital. A repeater must be placed so that a signal
reaches it before any noise changes the meaning of any of its bits.
BRIDGES
• Bridges operate in both the physical and the data link layers of the OSI reference
model.
• Bridges can divide a large network into smaller segments
• Keep the traffic for each segment seperate and also provide security through this
partitioning
• A bridge operates at the data link layer giving it access to the physical addresses of
all stations connected to it.
– when a frame enters a bridge, the bridge not only regenerates the signal, but
checks the address of the destination and forwards the new copy only to the
segment to which the address belongs.
Types of bridges
1. Simple bridge
• Least expensive
• It links two segments and contains a table that lists addresses of all the stations
which is entered manually
• Installation and maintenance of simple bridges are time-consuming
2. Multiport bridge
• A multiport can be used to connect more than two LANs.
3. Transparent bridge
• Transparent bridge builds its table of station addresses on its own as it perform its
bridge functions
There many issues to be considered when bridges connecting different LANs:
• Frames sent by different LANs have different formats.
• The size of the data that can be encapsulated in a frame varies from protocol to
protocol.
• Different protocols use different data rate.
• The bit orders of addresses in different LAN protocols is not the same.
ROUTERS
• A router is network layer hardware device that transmits data from one LAN to
another if both networks supports the same set of protocols.
• It recieves its data in the form of packets.
• Routers act like stations on a network - link to 2 or more networks at the same time.
Routing Concepts
1. Least cost routing - based on efficiency
• Shortest - The route requiring the smallest number of relays or hops - hop-count
routing - considered equal length and given value 1.
• Fastest, cheapest, more reliable, more secure or best of any other quality that can
make one particular link more attractive than another.
2. Routing is classified as nonadaptive or adaptive
• Non adaptive routing
– Once a pathway to a destination has been selected, the router sends all packets for
that destination along that one route.
• Adaptive routing
– In which, a router may select a new route for each packet in response to changes
in condition and topology of the networks.
GATEWAYS
• It operates in all seven layers of the OSI model.
• It is a protocol converter.
• A router by itself transfers, accepts and relays packets only across networks using
similar protocols. A gateway, on the other hand, can accept a packet formatted for
one protocol and convert it to a packet formatted for another protocol.
• A gateway is generally software installed within a router.
LOGICAL ADDRESSING
• The packet transmitted by the sending computer may pass through several LANs or
WANs before reaching the destination computer.
• For this level of communication, we need a global addressing scheme; we called this
logical addressing.
• The Internet addresses are 32 bits in length; this gives us a maximum of 2 32
addresses.These addresses are referred to as IPv4 (IP version 4) addresses.
• The need for more addresses,the Internet uses 128-bit addresses that give much
greater flexibility in address allocation. These addresses are referred to as IPv6 (IP
version 6) addresses.
IPv4
• The Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is a delivery mechanism used by the TCP/IP
protocols
• IPv4 is an unreliable and connectioless datagram protocol which operates on a best
effort delivery model
• The term best effort means that IPv4 provides no error control or flow control
• If reliability is important, IPv4 must be paired with a reliable protocol such as TCP
• IPv4 uses 32-bit (4 bytes) addressing, which gives 232 addresses
• It uses datagram approach.
• Each datagram is handled independently, and each datagram can follow a datagram
different route to the destination. This implies that datagrams sent by same source to
the same destination could arrive out of order,
• Packets in the IPv4 layer are called datagrams.
• It is variable length packet consisting of two parts: header and data.
• An header field contains:
• Version(VER):
– It defines the version of the IPv4 protocol.
• Header Length(HLEN)
– It defines the total length of the datagram header.
• Services
– Two types of services: service type, differentiated services.
• Total length
– It defines the total length of IPv4 datagram in bytes.
• Identification
– Used in fragmentation.
• Flags
– Used in fragmentation.
• Fragmentation offset
– Used in fragmentation.
• Time to live
– It is designed to hold a time stamp, which was decremented by each visited
router. The datagram discarded when the value became zero.
• Protocol
– The 8 bit field defines the higher level protocol that uses the services of the IPv4
layer.
• Checksum
– Error detection
• Source address:
– Defines the IPv4 address of the source
• Destination address
– Defines the IPv4 address of the destination
IPv6
• IPv6 is a 128-bit address
• It is an alphanumeric address that consists of 8 fields, which are seperayed by colon
• IPv6 doesnot contain classes of IP addresses, but contain a large number of IP
addresses
• In IPv6, the represesntation of IP address is in hexadecimal
• It provides encryption and authentication
Transition from IPv4 to IPv6
• Three stages have been devised to help the transition
1. Dual Stack
• Before migrating completely to version 6, have a dual stack of protocols
• A station must run IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously until all the internet uses IPv6
2. Tunneling
• It is a strategy used when 2 computers using IPv6 wants to communicate with each
other and the packet must pass through a region that uses IPv4
• To pass through this region, the packet must have an IPv4 address
• So the IPv6 packet encapsulated in an IPv4 packet when it enters the region, and it
leaves its capsule when it exits the region
3. Header Translation
• When the sender wants to use IPv6 but the reciever doesnot understand IPv6
• In this case the IP format must be totally changed through header translation
• The header of the IPv6 packet is converted to an IPv4 header
Address Mapping
• A packet starting from a source host may pass through several different physical
networks before finally reaching the destination host.
• The hosts and routers are recognized at the network level by their logical (IP)
addresses.
• However, packets pass through physical networks to reach these hosts and routers.
• At the physical level, the hosts and routers are recognized by their physical
addresses.
• Delivery of a packet to a host or a router requires two levels of addressing:
 logical
 physical
• We need to be able to map a logical address to its corresponding physical address and
vice versa.
• These can be done by using either static or dynamic mapping.
Static mapping
• It involves in the creation of a table that associates a logical address with a physical
address. This table is stored in each machine on the network.
Dynamic mapping
• In this each time a machine knows one of the two addresses (logical or physical), it
can use a protocol to find the other one.
Network Address Translation (NAT)
• NAT enables a user to have a large set of addresses internally and one address, or a
small set of addresses, externally.
– The traffic inside can use the large set; the traffic outside, the small set.
• The Internet authorities have reserved three sets of addresses as private addresses.
– They are unique inside the organization, but they are not unique globally.
• The site must have only one single connection to the global Internet through a router
that runs the NAT software.
Address Translation
• All the outgoing packets go through the NAT router, which replaces the source
address in the packet with the global NAT address.
• All incoming packets also pass through the NAT router, which replaces the
destination address in the packet (the NAT router global address) with the
appropriate private address.
DELIVERY
• Delivery refers to the way a packet is handled by the underlying networks under the
control of the network layer.
• The delivery of a packet to its final destination is accomplished by using two
different methods of delivery:
1. Direct Delivery
2. Indirect Delivery
Direct delivery
• If the final destination of the packet is a host connected to the same physical network
as the deliverer.
Indirect Delivery
• If the destination host is not on the same network as the deliverer, the packet is
delivered indirectly.
FORWARDING
• Forwarding refers to the way a packet is delivered to the next station.
Forwarding Techniques
• Several techniques can make the size of the routing table manageable and also
handle issues such as security.
• Next-Hop Method Versus Route Method
• Network-Specific Method Versus Host- Specific Method
Next-Hop Method Versus Route Method
• The routing table holds only the address of the next hop instead of information about
the complete route (route method).
Network-Specific Method Versus Host- Specific Method
• Instead of having an entry for every desti-nation host connected to the same physical
network (host-specific method), we have only one entry that defines the address of
the destination network itself.
Forwarding process
ROUTING (Process of finding shortest path)
• Routing refers to the way routing tables are created to help in forwarding.
• A host or a router has a routing table with an entry for each destination, or a
combination of destinations, to route IP packets.
• The routing table can be either static or dynamic.
– A static routing table contains information entered manually. The administrator
enters the route for each destination into the table.
– A dynamic routing table is updated periodically by using one of the dynamic
routing protocols such as RIP (Routing Information Protocol), OSPF (Open
Shortest Path First), BGP (Border Gateway Protocol).
• An internet is divided into autonomous systems.
• An autonomous system (AS) is a group of networks and routers under the authority
of a single administration.
• Routing inside an autonomous system is referred to as intradomain routing.
• Routing between autonomous systems is referred to as interdomain routing.
• Routing Information Protocol (RIP) is an implementation of the distance vector
protocol.
• Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is an implementation of the link state protocol.
• Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is an implementation of the path vector protocol.
DISTANCE VECTOR ROUTING
• In this protocol, as the name implies, each node maintains a vector (table) of
minimum distances to every node.
• Distance vector route is done by 3 phases :
1. Initialization
2. Sharing
3. Updating
Initialization :
• At the beginning, Each node can know onlythe distance between itself and its
immediate neighbors, those directly connected to it.
• The distance for any entry that is not a neighbor is marked as infinite (unreachable).
Sharing :
• The whole idea of distance vector routing is the sharing of information between
neighbors.
• In distance vector routing, each node shares its routing table with its immediate
neighbors periodically and when there is a change.
Updating :
• When a node receives a two-column table from a neighbor, it needs to update its
rout-ing table. Updating takes three steps:
1. The recieving node needs to add the cost between itself
2. The recieving node needs to add the name of the sending node to each row
3. The recieving node needs to compare each row of its old table with the
corresponding row of the modified version of the recieved table.
LINK STATE ROUTING
• In link state routing, four sets of actions are required to ensure that each node has the
routing table showing the least-cost node to every other node.
1. Creation of the states of the links by each node, called the link state packet (LSP).
2. Dissemination of LSPs to every other router, called flooding, in an efficient and
reliable way.
3. Formation of a shortest path tree for each node.
4. Calculation of a routing table based on the shortest path tree.
 Creation of Link State Packet (LSP)
→ LSPs are generated on two occasions:
• When there is a change in the topology of the domain.
• On a periodic basis.
 Flooding of LSPs
• After a node has prepared an LSP, it must be disseminated to all other nodes, not
only to its neighbors.
 Formation of Shortest Path Tree: Dijkstra Algorithm
• Calculation of Routing Table from Shortest Path Tree
• Each node uses the short-est path tree protocol to construct its routing table.
• Open Shortest Path First or OSPF protocol is an intradomain routing protocol based
on link state routing.