ECE3076 Communication Networks Summer 2003

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Georgia Tech
Homework 3
Due June 19, 2003 Thursday
Problems
1. A group of N stations share a 56 kbps pure (unslotted) aloha channel. Each station has one
(NEW) packet arriving every 100 seconds and packets are 1000 bits long. What is the
required data rate? What is the available data rate? What is the maximum value of N that the
channel can accommodate?
2. Suppose you measure a slotted aloha channel and determine that 10% of the slots are idle.
(a) What is the channel load g?
(b) What is the system throughput in packets/slot?
(c) Is the channel overloaded or under-loaded?
3. Consider CSMA/CD. Let B=t/D, where t is the (ave.) propagation delay, and D (ave.)
transmission delay. The throughput is E=1/[1+5B].
Given:
Transmission rate C=100Mbps,
Frame length L=2000 bits,
Cable distance d=1 mile,
and assume that signals travel at the speed of light in the cable.
(a) Find t and D.
(b) Find B and E.
(c) If C=1Gbps, repeat (a) and (b).
(d) When the transmission rate increases, does E increase or decrease? Why?
4.
(a) Summarize key characteristics and the corresponding maximum throughput of the
following MAC protocols: Aloha, Slotted Aloha, CSMA/CD.
(b) Suppose now that all stations have the same average traffic arrival rate. For each of
the above protocols, is it possible to achieve a throughput of 1 (i.e., have the channel
always be fully utilized)? If not, indicate how/why the protocol limits the maximum
throughput to less than 1.
5. (Prob. 13.4 from Stallings 6th Ed) Consider a baseband bus with a number of equally spaced
stations with a data rate of 10 Mbps and a bus length of 1 km.
(a) What is the mean time to send a frame of 1000 bits to another station, measured from
the beginning of transmission to the end of reception? Assume a propagation speed of
200 m/ s.
(b) If two stations begin to transmit at exactly the same time, their packets will interfere
with each other. If each transmitting station monitors the bus during transmission,
how long before it notices an interference, in second? In bit times?
6. (Prob. 13.5 from Stallings 6th Ed) Repeat Problem 13.4 for a data rate of 100 Mbps.