Communication Protocols

Exercise 1

16.10.2018

1. Why layering? During the lecture you learned that most networks are
organized as a stack of layers.
(a) What are two reasons for using a layered structure?
(b) Discuss also two possible disadvantages of such a structure.
(c) Can you think of other layered structures being used to organize
complex systems (beyond the domain of communication networks)?
2. What is the Internet?
• A network of networks? Distributed system of hosts, routers ...
• Or there is some central control, hmm?
Give your own persceptive on what the Internet is and why it is an ‘inte-
gral part’ of your everyday life.
3. Understanding some basic networking terminology: Consider two hosts,
A and B, connected by a single link of rate R bps. The link is x meters
long, and the propagation speed is s m/s. Host A sends a message of
size L bits to host B.
(a) In terms of R, x, s, and L, determine the following:
• propagation delay, dprop ,
• transmission delay, dtrans , and
• end-to-end delay, dend−end .
(b) Suppose that R = 4 Mbps, d = 500 m, s = 2 × 108 m/s, and L = 4096
bits. Host A starts transmitting the message at time instant t1 = 0.
i. At what time instant, t2 , will the message be fully received by
node B?
ii. Will host B start receiving the message before or after A finishes
the transmission of the message?

1
4. An Exercise on Probabilities: We will be calculating probabilities occasionally
in this course, therefore some refreshing basic exercises might be useful.
On a wireless link between two network devices a message has a proba-
bility p of getting lost.
(a) If one of the devices sends k messages, what is the probability that n
of them are received?
(b) Consider that when a message is lost, the sender sends the message
again and again until it is received correctly. Calculate the probabil-
ity that a message is received successfully at the k − th transmission
attempt.

5. More Probabilities!
If the probability of a bit error on a link is pb , what is the probability of
an erroneous message if the message size is N bytes, and assuming that
the bit errors are independent of each other?