NETWORK SOFTWARE

Dr. SHUCHITA UPADHYAYA BHASIN

Professor
Department of Computer Science &
Applications
 Contents Coverage

 Protocols
 Services
 Design issues for the layers
 Network Architecture

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 PROTOCOLS
• In computer networks, communication occurs
between entities in different systems (computers etc.)
• An entity is anything capable of sending or receiving
information.
• Examples of entities are application programs, file
transfer packages, browsers, database management
systems, electronic mail software etc.
• For two entities to communicate successfully, they
must speak the same language
- What is communicated, how it is communicated,
and when it is communicated must conform to
some mutually acceptable conventions between
the entities involved.

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 PROTOCOLS (contd.)
The conventions are referred to as a protocol, which
may be defined as:
 a set of rules governing the exchange of data
between two entities.
Examples of protocols in the Internet:
 HTTP for retrieval of Web pages
 File Transfer Protocol (FTP) for the transfer of files
 Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) for e-mail
 Internet Protocol (IP) for the transfer of packets
 Domain Name System (DNS) for IP address lookup

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 PROTOCOLS (contd,)
The key elements of a protocol are:
syntax, semantics, and timing
• Syntax: refers to the structure or format of
the data

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Elements of Protocol
• Semantics
refers to the meaning of each section of bits.
 How is a particular pattern to be interpreted,
and what action is to be taken based on that
interpretation?
For example, an address may identify the
route to be taken or the final destination of
the message.

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Elements of Protocol contd.

Timing
 when data should be sent
 how fast it can be sent
For example
 if a sender produces data at 100 Mbps but
the receiver can process data at only 1 Mbps,
the transmission will overload the receiver
and data will be largely lost.
By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin
 NETWORK DESIGN ISSUES

Interfacing and Signal Generation

• In order to communicate, a device must interface
with the transmission system
• Once an interface is established, signal
generation is required for communication.
• The properties of the signal, such as form and
intensity, must be such that they are (1) capable
of being propagated through the transmission
system, and (2) interpretable as data at the
receiver.
• Signals can be either analog or digital.
By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin
 Data Synchronization

It is the process of establishing

consistency among data from a source
to destination devices and vice versa
and continuous harmonization of the
data over time.

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Exchange Management

• For meaningful data transmission there

should be some management of data being
exchanged.
• Both the transmitter and receiver should
adhere to some common convention about
the format of data, amount of data, time
required, etc.

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Addressing
• A computer network contains a number of
computers. Since any computer out of so
many computers can be the sender or the
receiver, some mechanism is required for
identifying senders and receivers.
• As a consequence, some form of addressing
is needed in order to specify a specific
destination when multiple destination
computers are present.
By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin
 Addressing contd.

• Four levels of addressing are used in a

network (or Internet: a world wide network
of networks,):
– physical addresses
– logical addresses
– port addresses
– specific addresses

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Physical Address
• The physical address, also known as link address or
MAC address, is the address of a node as defined by
its LAN or WAN.
• In a LAN, the physical address of a computer is
identified by its Network Interface Card (NIC).
• For example, consider an Ethernet/IEEE 802.3 LAN
address, which consists of 48 bits (six bytes)
represented as 12 hexadecimal digits and partitioned
into six groups of two like 08:01:20:02:2C:4B.
• Thus, a physical address typically identifies a
computer by its physical interface within the network.

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Logical Address
• Logical addresses are necessary for universal
communications that are independent of underlying
physical networks.
• Physical addresses are not adequate in an
internetwork environment (such as the world wide
Internet) where so many different types of networks
are connected, each having different address formats.
• A logical address in the Internet is currently 32-bit or
128-bit address that can uniquely define a host
connected to the Internet.
• No two hosts on the Internet can have the same IP
address

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Port Addresses
• Communication occurs
from an end application to
an end application
(processes).
• Data generated by an
application on one machine
must be received by the
correct application on the
other machine.
• In the Internet software
the addresses assigned to
these processes are known
as port addresses.
• In TCP/IP a port address is
16 bits in length.

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Specific Addresses

• Some applications permit users to use user-

friendly addresses.
• For example, an e-mail address like
abc@yahoo.com or a URL like www.ku.in for
accessing a web site.
• User-friendly addresses need to be converted
to logical addresses (IP address) using
Domain Name Service .

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Routing
• Routing means selecting the best path for
sending a packet from one point to another
when more than one path is available.
• Routing is required in all networks except LANs
like Ethernet, which are based on broadcasting
• Particularly applicable to Wide Area Networks
(WANs) based on point-to-point technology.
• Routing is performed by special dedicated
hardware units called routers

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Routing contd.
• Datagram service :Each data packet may take
a different route to the destination, where
the packets are collected and reassembled
into their original order
• Virtual circuit service: A route may be
decided for a communication before the
communication starts, and all the data
packets of that communication follow the
same route.
By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin
 Routing contd.
• Routing can be highly dynamic, being
determined a new for each packet, to reflect
the current network load (traffic)
• The best route a packet should take is a
function of a specific criterion, which is called
a metric
• Some well known metrics used in routing
algorithms are delay, load, hop count,
bandwidth etc.
By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin
 Flow Control
• how to keep a fast sender from swamping a slow
receiver with data.
• Flow control is introduced to check the sender into
sending no faster than the receiver can handle the
traffic.
• The checking generally requires some kind of
feedback mechanism, so the sender can be made
aware of whether or not the receiver is able to keep
up.
• Flow control is a set of procedures that tell the
sender how much data it can transmit before it must
wait for an acknowledgement from the receiver.

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Error Control
• The end-to-end transfer of data, over a
series of error-prone routers and links, from a
transmitting application to a receiving
application involves many steps, each subject
to error.
• With adequate error control, we can be
confident that the transmitted and received
data are identical

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Error Control contd.
• Error can occur both at the bit and at the
packet level.
• At the bit level, the most common error is
the inversion of a 0 bit to a 1, or a 1 bit to a 0.
• At the packet level, we see errors such as
packet loss, duplication, or reordering.
• Error control is the process of detecting and
correcting both bit and packet errors.

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Reliability
• Networks must be able to transfer data from one
device to another with complete accuracy.
• Many factors, including line noise, can alter or wipe
out one or more bits of a given data unit.
• Reliable systems must have a mechanism for
detecting and correcting such errors.
• Various services are designed in the network software
architecture in order to ensure a reliable and error
free delivery of data to the destination machine.
• This is achieved by including sequence numbers and
acknowledgements for the transmitted data for their
reliable delivery.

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Media Access Control
• Medium Access Control exists in broadcast networks
where a single communication channel is used.
• In a broadcast network, the key issue is how to
determine who gets to use the channel when there is
competition for it.
• Protocols for solving this problem are identified as
medium access control (MAC) protocols.
• The role of the medium access control (MAC)
protocols is to coordinate the access to the channel so
that information in the broadcast network gets
through from a source to a destination successfully.

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Security
• With the rise of Internet, which is a public
network, and its use for conducting business
as well as the other services it provides, parts
of most organizations’ networks are more
open and vulnerable to unauthorized access,
computer viruses, and attacks that are more
disruptive.
• Data confidentiality, integrity,
authentication, and nonrepudiation are some
of the security issues for computer networks.

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Security contd.
• Encrypting the data in a secret way is one of the
methods to maintain data confidentiality and to
secure data while transmission.
• Authentication is a technique where legality of
a person or operation is verified before carrying
out a sensitive task.
• Data Integrity means that the data must arrive
at the receiver as they were sent. There must be
no changes during the transmission, neither
accidentally nor maliciously. For example, it
would be disastrous if a request for transferring
Rs.10,000 changed to Rs.100,000.

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Security contd.
• Message nonrepudiation means that a sender
must not be able to deny sending a message he
or she, in fact, did send.
• Digital signatures are a solution to all these
issues namely – integrity, authentication, and
nonrepudiation.
• Firewalls, a combination of hardware and
software, are used at the entry and exit points
of a private network connected to the Internet,
so that unauthorized transfer of information in
or out of the network may be checked.

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 NETWORK ARCHITECTURE
• Instead of a single module for performing
communications, there is a structured set of
modules that implements the communications
functions.
That structure is referred to as
network architecture
• The structured set of modules referred above is
known as layers or levels, each one built upon
its predecessor.
• Network architecture includes the set of layers
and protocols.

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 NETWORK ARCHITECTURE contd.
Layers:
• The number of layers, the name of each layer, the contents of
each layer, and the function of each layer differ from network to
network.
Services:
• The purpose of each layer is to offer certain services to the higher
layers, shielding those layers from the details of how the offered
services are actually implemented.
Interface:
• Between each pair of adjacent layers there is an interface. The
interface defines which primitive operations and services the
lower layer offers to the upper one.
Protocols:
• protocols are used to implement service definitions.

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Protocol Data Units : PDU = Control + Data

Control information is added to User Data at each layer of

Network Architecture.
 Protocol Data Unit (PDU) is used to describe protocol
messages.
 A PDU at layer n is a message sent between protocols at
layer n.
 It consists of layer n header information and an
encapsulated message from layer n+1

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

Protocol Data Unit contd.

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

Layer Services and Data Encapsulation

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Service models
• The service model of a given layer specifies
the manner in which information is
transmitted.
• There are two broad categories of service
models :
 connection-oriented
 connectionless

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Connection Oriented Service
This method is often called a "reliable"
network service. It can guarantee that data
will arrive in the same order.
 Connection-oriented services set up virtual
links between end systems through a network.
Connection-oriented service involves three
phases:
• Connection Establishment
• Data Transfer
• ConnectionTermination

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 Connectionless Service
• Does not require a session connection between sender and
receiver.
• The sender simply starts sending packets (called datagrams) to the
destination.
• Individual self-contained blocks of information are transmitted
and delivered using address information in each PDU.
• Information blocks transmitted from the same user to the same
destination are transmitted independently.
• Here, each message carries the full destination address, and each
one is routed through the system independent of all the others.
• It is also possible that a message sent first in order may be
received after the second or subsequent messages meaning
thereby that the order of messages is not guaranteed.
• The service does not provide an acknowledgement for
transmitted PDUs. Thus if a PDU is lost during transmission, no
effort is made to retransmit it.

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

Bit rates
Name Symbol Multiple
bit per second bit/s 1 1

Decimal prefixes (SI)

kilobit per second kbit/s 103 10001

megabit per second Mbit/s 106 10002

gigabit per second Gbit/s 109 10003

terabit per second Tbit/s 1012 10004

Binary prefixes
kibibit per second Kibit/s 210 10241

mebibit per second Mibit/s 220 10242

gibibit per second Gibit/s 230 10243

tebibit per second Tibit/s 240 10244

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin

 SELF ASSESSMENT QUESTIONS
1. What do you mean by the terms protocol, services and layers?
2. What is network architecture? Why do we have layered network
architecture?
3. Explain layered network architecture in terms of protocols, services
and interfaces.
4. Give an example to explain the concept of protocol and layering.
5. What is the difference between connection-oriented and
connectionless services? Give examples of protocols based on these
services.
6. What are the relevant design issues for a computer network?
Describe all design issues in brief.
7. Define Routing, Error Control, Flow Control, Media Access Control ,
and Security in the context of computer networks.
8. Give a brief description of the various kinds of addressing used in
computer networks/Internet.
Note: Depict the concepts using diagrams wherever necessary

By Dr. Shuchita Upadhyaya Bhasin