Unit III

“Wired LANs : Ethernet”

By
Mr. Raghuram K. M.
Assistant Professor,
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering
SDM College of Engineering and Technology, Dharwad, Karnataka.
1
• LAN market has seen several technologies
such as Ethernet, Token Ring, Token Bus, FDDI,
and ATM LAN
• Ethernet is by far the dominant technology
• IEEE Standard Project 802, designed to
regulate the manufacturing and
interconnectivity between different LANs
• Ethernet has gone through a four-generation
evolution

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 1. IEEE STANDARDS
• Project 802 is a way of specifying functions of
the physical layer and the data link layer of
major LAN protocols.
• Approved by ANSI and ISO also
• IEEE has subdivided the data link layer into
two sublayers: logical link control (LLC) and
media access control (MAC).

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Figure 13.1 IEEE standard for LANs

13.4
Figure 13.2 HDLC frame compared with LLC and MAC frames

13.5
 Logical Link Control (LLC)
• flow control, error control, and part of the
framing duties
Framing:
• LLC defines a protocol data unit (PDU)
• header contains a control field used for flow and
error control.
• two other header fields define the upper-layer
protocol at the source and destination that uses
LLC – destination service access point (DSAP) and
the source service access point (SSAP)
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Media Access Control (MAC)
• defines the specific access method for each LAN
• defines CSMA/CD as the media access method for
Ethernet LANs and the tokenpassing method for
Token Ring and Token Bus LANs
• part of the framing function is also handled by
the MAC layer

Physical Layer
• Different physical layer specifications for each
Ethernet implementations

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 2. STANDARD ETHERNET
• original Ethernet was created in 1976 at Xerox's
Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
• four generations: Standard Ethernet (lot Mbps),
Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps), Gigabit Ethernet (l
Gbps), and Ten-Gigabit Ethernet (l0 Gbps),

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MAC Sublayer

Frame Format

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Preamble 
• Alternating Os and Is that alerts the receiving system to
the coming frame and enables it to synchronize its
input timing.
Start frame delimiter (SFD)
• signals the beginning of the frame
• 1 byte: 10101011
Destination address (DA) 
Source address (SA) 
Length or type 
• type field to define the upper-layer protocol(earlier)
• length field to define the number of bytes in the data
field
Data
CRC  for error detection
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Figure 13.5 Minimum and maximum lengths

13.11
• minimum length restriction is required for the
correct operation of CSMAlCD
• maximum length restriction has two historical
1. maximum length restriction helped to reduce
the size of the buffer
2. prevents one station from monopolizing the
shared medium, blocking other stations that
have data to send

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Addressing

• Unicast, Multicast, and Broadcast Addresses

• If the least significant bit of the first byte in a
destination address is 0, the address is unicast;
otherwise, it is multicast
• The broadcast destination address is a special case of
the multicast address in which all bits are 1s.

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 Example 13.1

Define the type of the following destination addresses:

a. 4A:30:10:21:10:1A b. 47:20:1B:2E:08:EE
c. FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF
Solution
To find the type of the address, we need to look at the second hexadecimal
digit from the left. If it is even, the address is unicast. If it is odd, the
address is multicast. If all digits are F’s, the address is broadcast. Therefore,
we have the following:
a. This is a unicast address because A in binary is 1010.
b. This is a multicast address because 7 in binary is 0111.
c. This is a broadcast address because all digits are F’s.
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• Access Method: CSMAICD
• uses I-persistent
• Slot time =round-trip time + time required to
send the jam sequence - 51.2 us
• Maximum Network Length

• considering the delay times in repeaters and

interfaces, and the time required to send the jam
sequence maximum-length reduces to 2500 m

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Physical Layer
• Four physical layer implementations

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Encoding and Decoding
• data are converted to a digital signal using the
Manchester scheme

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10Base5: Thick Ethernet (Thicknet)
• Thick cable
• bus topology with an external transceiver
(transmitter/receiver) connected via a tap to a thick
coaxial cable
• transceiver is connected to the station via a transceiver
cable that provides separate paths for sending and
receiving
• Any collision here happens in the cable
• maximum length of the coaxial cable must not exceed
500 m, otherwise, there is excessive degradation of the
signal
• up to five segments, each a maximum of 500m, can be
connected using repeaters

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Figure 13.10 10Base5 implementation

13.19
10Base2: Thin Ethernet (Cheapernet)
• uses a bus topology, but the cable is much
thinner and more flexible
• cable can be bent to pass very close to the
stations
• transceiver is normally part of the network
interface card (NIC), which is installed inside the
station
• Any collision here happens in the cable
• cost effective
• Installation is simpler
• length of each segment cannot exceed 185 m

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Figure 13.11 10Base2 implementation

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lOBase-T: Twisted-Pair Ethernet
• Uses a physical star topology
• stations are connected to a hub via two pairs
of twisted cable - one for sending and one for
receiving
• Any collision here happens in the hub
• maximum length of the twisted cable here is
defined as 100 m

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Figure 13.12 10Base-T implementation

13.23
lOBase-F: Fiber Ethernet
• uses a star topology
• Stations are connected to the hub using two
fiber-optic cables

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 Table 13.1 Summary of Standard Ethernet implementations

13.25
 3. CHANGES IN THE STANDARD
• Ethernet has gone through several changes

Bridged Ethernet
• division of a LAN by bridges
• Bridges raise the bandwidth and they separate
collision domains.

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Figure 13.15 A network with and without a bridge

13.27
Figure 13.16 Collision domains in an unbridged network and a bridged network

13.28
Switched Ethernet
• N port switch – N networks of single stations
• bandwidth is shared only between the station
and the switch
• the collision domain is divided into N domains

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Full-Duplex Ethernet
• instead of using one link between the station
and the switch, the configuration uses two
links: one to transmit and one to receive
• full-duplex mode increases the capacity of
each domain from 10 to 20 Mbps
• No Needfor CSMA/CD
• To provide for flow and error control in full-
duplex switched Ethernet, a new sublayer,
called the MAC control, is added between the
LLC sublayer and the MAC sublayer.

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Figure 13.18 Full-duplex switched Ethernet

13.31
 “Wireless LANs ”

By
Mr. Raghuram K. M.
Assistant Professor,
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering
SDM College of Engineering and Technology, Dharwad, Karnataka.
32
 1. IEEE 802.11
• specifications for a wireless LAN
Architecture
• two kinds of services: the basic service set
(BSS) and the extended service set (ESS)

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Basic Service Set
• made of stationary or mobile wireless stations
and an optional central base station, known as
the access point (AP)
BSS without an AP:
• stand-alone network and cannot send data to
other BSSs
• ad hoc architecture
• stations can form a network without the need of
an AP; they can locate one another and agree to
be part of a BSS

BSS with an AP:

• an infrastructure network
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Figure 14.1 Basic service sets (BSSs)

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Extended Service Set
• made up of two or more BSSs with Aps
• BSSs are connected through a distribution system,
which is usually a wired LAN
• uses two types of stations: mobile and stationary
• Mobile stations are normal stations inside a BSS.
The stationary stations are AP stations that are
part of a wired LAN
• stations within reach of one another can
communicate without the use of an AP.
• communication between two stations in two
different BSSs usually occurs via two APs
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Figure 14.2 Extended service sets (ESSs)

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Station Types
• three types of stations based on their mobility in
a wireless LAN: no-transition, BSS transition, and
ESS-transition mobility
• station with no-transition mobility is either
stationary (not moving) or moving only inside a
BSS
• station with BSS-transition mobility can move
from one BSS to another, but the movement is
confined inside one ESS
• station with ESS-transition mobility can move
from one ESS to another

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 MAC Sublayer
• two MAC sublayers: the distributed
coordination function (DCF) and point
coordination function (PCF)

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 Distributed Coordination Function
• Wireless LANs cannot implement CSMAfCD for
three reasons: cost of receiving the sent data is
more, hidden station problem and signal fading
problem
• So uses CSMA/CA as the access method
Terms used
• distributed interframe space (DIFS)
• short interframe space (SIFS)
• request to send (RTS)
• clear to end (CTS)

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Figure 14.4 CSMA/CA flowchart

14.41
Figure 14.5 CSMA/CA and NAV

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Network Allocation Vector(NAV):
• When a station sends an RTS frame, it includes the
duration of time that it needs to occupy the channel
• stations that are affected by this transmission create a
timer called a network allocation vector (NAV) that
shows how much time must pass before these stations
are allowed to check the channel for idleness
• each station, before sensing the physical medium to
see if it is idle, first checks its NAV to see if it has
expired

Collision During Handshaking

• Sender assumes there has been a collision if it has not
received a CTS frame from the receiver. The back-off
strategy is employed, and the sender tries again

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Point Coordination Function (PCF)
• optional access method that can be implemented in an
infrastructure network
• implemented on top of the DCF and is used mostly for
time-sensitive transmission
• centralized, contention-free polling access method - AP
performs polling
• PIFS (PCF IFS) is shorter than the DIFS - AP has priority
• Due to the priority of PCF over DCF, stations that only
use DCF may not gain access to the medium. To
prevent this, a repetition interval has been designed to
cover both contention-free (PCF) and contention-based
(DCF) traffic
• beacon frame at the beginning

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Figure 14.6 Example of repetition interval

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Fragmentation
• division of a large frame into smaller ones. It is
more efficient to resend a small frame than a
large one

Frame Format

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• Frame control (FC) - defines the type of frame
and some control information

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• D: duration of the transmission that is used to
set the value of NAV
• Addresses: four fields- meaning of each
address field depends on the value of the To
DS and From DS subfields
• Sequence control: sequence number of the
frame to be used in flow control
• Frame body: contains information
• FCS: contains a CRC-32 error detection
sequence

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Frame Types
• three categories of frames: management
frames, control frames, and data frames
• Management Frames: used for the initial
communication between stations and access
points.
• Control Frames: used for accessing the
channel and acknowledging frames.
• Data Frames:used for carrying data and
control information

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Figure 14.8 Control frames

Table 14.2 Values of subfields in control frames

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Addressing Mechanism
• specifies four cases, defined by the value of
the two flags in the FC field, To DS and From
DS
• DS Distribution System

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• Case 1: 00  The frame is going from one
station in a BSS to another without passing
through the distribution system
• Case 1: 01 The frame is coming from an
• AP and going to a station
• Case 1: 10  The frame is going from a station
to an AP
• Case 1: 11 The frame is going from one AP
to another AP in a wireless distribution system

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Figure 14.9 Addressing mechanisms

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Hidden and Exposed Station Problems
• Hidden Station Problem 
When station B is sending data to station A and in
the middle of this transmission, station C also has
data to send to station A
• solution to the hidden station problem is the use
of the handshake frames (RTS and CTS)
• CTS message from A, which contains the duration
of data transmission from B to A reaches C.
Station C knows that some hidden station is using
the channel and refrains from transmitting until
that duration is over.

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Figure 14.10 Hidden station problem

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Figure 14.11 Use of handshaking to prevent hidden station problem

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Exposed Station Problem
• station refrains from using a channel when it is, in
fact, available
• station A is transmitting to station B. Station C has
some data to send to station D, which can be sent
without interfering with the transmission from A
to B.
• station C is exposed to transmission from A; it
hears what A is sending and thus refrains from
sending
• C is too conservative and wastes the capacity of
the channel
• handshaking messages RTS and CTS cannot help

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Figure 14.12 Exposed station problem

14.58
Figure 14.13 Use of handshaking in exposed station problem

14.59
Figure 14.13 Use of handshaking in exposed station problem

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 Table 14.4 Physical layers

14.61