Homework, sheet 1

April 29, 2013

Exercise 1. In the slide comparing circuit switching and packet switching, the practical case considers an 1 Mbps link shared by users active just 10% of the time with bandwidth 100 Kbps. How is the 10 user bound obtained in the circuit switching scenario? For the packet switching scenario, the slide claims that the probability of having more than 10 active users over 35 at the same time is about 0.0004. How is this value obtained? Exercise 2. Suppose that the following network is circuit switched and that each link supports 5 circuits. A B

What is the maximum number of circuits the network can create simultaneously? How many circuits can we create simultaneously from host A to C ? And from A to D? How many circuits can we create simultaneously from host A to C and from B to D? Exercise 3. As seen in the lecture, the propagation delay dprop along a link is dened as m/s where m is the length of the link and s is the speed of the signal in the link while the transmission delay dtrans . The transmission delay dtrans is dened as L/R where L is the length of the packet to transmit and R is the bandwidth or transmission rate. If the rst bit of the packet is sent at time t = 0, where is the last bit of the packet at time dtrans ? If dtrans > dprop , where is the rst bit of the packet at time dtrans ? If dtrans < dprop , where is the rst bit of the packet at time dtrans ? 1

 After which time does the last bit arrive at the end of the link? Exercise 4. The CERN research centre generates a huge amount of raw data each day that has to be studied by physicists. According to its web-site (http: //home.web.cern.ch/about/computing), the generation rate of the possible interesting data is about 1 GB per second. Suppose that the experiment runs for 1 hour and then data has to be analysed by a group of physicists that are 25 Km away from the data center. The only internet connection between physicists and the data center is a dedicated 1 Gbps link. How much time have the physicists to wait before the download of the data nishes? How is it possible to provide the collected data in a shorter time without spending too much?