IT-604: Internet Architecture & Protocols

Dr. Ihsan Ullah

Department of Computer Science & IT

University of Balochistan, Quetta
Pakistan
Email: [email protected]

November 07, 2016

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Underlying technologies

Reference Material

Chapter 3 of “TCP/IP Protocol Suite”, 4th edition,by

Behrouz A. Forouzan (MCGRAW-HILL, 2010)

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Underlying technologies

TCP/IP protocol stack only defines protocols for the top three
layer
Conceptually, the Internet is a set of switched WANs
(backbones), LANs, point-to-point WANs, and connecting or
switching devices
What comes below under these three layers is the topic of
discussion

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LAN

A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that is

designed for a limited geographic area such as a building or a
campus
Can be used as an isolated network to connect computers in
an organization for the sole purpose of sharing resources, or
can also be linked to a wide area network (WAN) or the
Internet
Several technologies such as Ethernet, token ring, token bus,
FDDI, and ATM LAN
Ethernet is the most dominant one

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IEEE Standard Project 802

To set standards to enable intercommunication among

equipments from a variety of manufacturers
To specify functions of the physical layer and the data link
layer of major LAN protocols
Division of the data link layer into two sub-layers: logical link
control (LLC) and media access control (MAC)
Creation of several physical layer standards for different LAN
protocols
http://www.ieee802.org/

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Ethernet Frame

Preamble:
The first field of the 802.3 frame contains 7 bytes (56 bits) of
alternating 0s and 1s
Alerts the receiving system to the coming frame
Enables it to synchronize its input timing
The 56-bit pattern allows the stations to miss some bits at the
beginning of the frame
The preamble is actually added at the physical layer and is not
(formally) part of the frame

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Ethernet Frame

Start frame delimiter (SFD):

The second field (1 byte: 10101011) signals the beginning of
the frame
The SFD warns the station or stations that this is the last
chance for synchronization
The last 2 bits are 11 and alert the receiver that the next field
is the destination address
The SFD is also added at the physical layer

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Ethernet Frame

Destination address (DA):

The DA field is 6 bytes and contains the physical address of
the destination station or stations to receive the packet

Source address (SA):

The SA field is also 6 bytes and contains the physical address
of the sender of the packet

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Ethernet Frame

Length or type:
The original Ethernet used this field as the type field to define
the upper-layer protocol using the MAC frame
The IEEE standard used it as the length field to define the
number of bytes in the data field
Both uses are common today
Data
This field carries data encapsulated from the upper-layer
protocols
It is a minimum of 46 and a maximum of 1500 bytes
CRC: Cyclic Redundancy Check
The last field contains error detection information

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Frame length

Ethernet has imposed restrictions on both the minimum and

maximum lengths of a frame
18 bytes of header and trailer (6 bytes of source address, 6
bytes of destination address, 2 bytes of length or type, and 4
bytes of CRC), then the minimum length of data from the
upper layer is 64 − 18 = 46 bytes
If the upper-layer packet is less than 46 bytes, padding is
added to make up the difference
The maximum length of a frame (without preamble and SFD
field) as 1518 bytes
The maximum length of the payload is 1500 bytes
Minimum frame length:64 bytes, Maximum frame length:
1518 bytes
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Ethernet Addressing

Each station on an Ethernet network (such as a PC,

workstation, or printer) has its own network interface card
(NIC)
Each NIC has 6-byte physical address, normally written in
hexadecimal notation, with a colon between the bytes.
Normally referred to as the data link address, physical
address, or MAC address
2e : af: 4b : da : c1: 05

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Unicast, Multicast, and Broadcast Addresses

Unicast address: Defines only one receiver. The relationship

between sender and receiver is one-to-one
Multicast address: A multicast destination address defines a
group of addresses; the relationship between the sender and
the receivers is one-to-many
Broadcast address: The broadcast address is a special case of
the multicast address; the recipients are all the stations on the
LAN

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Unicast, Multicast, and Broadcast Addresses

A source address is always a unicast addressthe frame comes

from only one station
The destination address can be unicast, multicast, or
broadcast
If the least significant bit of the first byte in a destination
address is 0, the address is unicast; otherwise, it is multicast
A broadcast destination address has all bits on tha is
forty-eight 1s equivalent to FF:FF:FF:FF:FF in hexadecimal
notation

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Unicast, Multicast, and Broadcast Addresses

What the following destination addresses are?

FF:FF:FF:FF:FF
4A:30:10:21:10:1A
47:20:1B:2E:08:EE

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Transmission sequence

The transmission is left-to-right, byte by byte; however, for

each byte, the least significant bit is sent first and the most
significant bit is sent last
Question. Show how the address 47:20:1B:2E:08:EE is sent
out on line?
Answer. ← 11100010 00000100 11011000 01110100
00010000 01110111

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Ethernet evolution

Created in 1976 at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)

Has gone through four generations:
Standard Ethernet (10 Mbps)
Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps)
Gigabit Ethernet (1 Gbps)
Ten-Gigabit Ethernet (10 Gbps)

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Standard Ethernet

The original Ethernet with 10-Mbps data rate is now history

We briefly discuss its characteristics to pave the way for
understanding other Ethernet versions

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Access Method: CSMA/CD

Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection

(CSMA/CD)
Defined by the IEEE 802.3 as the access method for
traditional Ethernet
Stations on a traditional Ethernet can be connected together
using a physical bus or star topology, but the logical topology
is always a bus
The medium (channel) is shared between stations and only
one station at a time can use it
A frame sent by a station is received by all stations
(broadcasting)
The real destination keeps the frame while the rest drop it
How to ensure that no more than one station use the medium
at the same time?
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Access Method: CSMA/CD

CSMA was developed to minimize the chance of collision

Requires that each station first listen to the medium
A station may sense the medium and find it idle, only because
the first bit sent by another station has not yet reached

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Access Method: CSMA/CD

CSMA/CD augments the algorithm to handle the collision

A station monitors the medium after it sends a frame to see if
the transmission was successful
If yes, the station is finished with sending
If there is a collision, the station aborts transmission and the
frame is to be sent again later
It is necessary to detect a collision before sending the last bit
of the frame because a station after transmitting the complete
frame does not keep a copy of that frame and does no more
perform collision detection
The frame size becomes important

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Minimum frame size

If the two stations involved in a collision are the maximum

distance apart, the signal from the first takes time Tp to reach
the second
If the second starts transmission just before it receives from
first, then it will another time Tp to reach the first
So the requirement is that the first station must still be
transmitting after 2Tp
Therefore, in the worst case the transmission time Tfr must
be at least two times the maximum propagation time Tp that
is equal to one Round Trip Time (RTT)

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Minimum frame size

In the standard Ethernet, if the maximum propagation time is

25.6 µs, what is the minimum size of the frame?
The frame transmission time is Tfr = 2 × Tp = 51.2µs
Minimum frame size = bandwidth × 2Tp
Thus in the given scenario, the minimum size of the frame is
10 Mbps x 51.2 µs = 512 bits or 64 bytes
Actually the minimum size of the frame for Standard Ethernet

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