Worksheet I

Exercise/review questions on introduction section

1. Why is circuit swhitching not sutable for comptuer to computer traffice? What are the three steps
that are required for data communication using circuit switching
2. With respect ot sharing of links, which of circuit switching or packet switching is more suitable?
3. Among virtual circuit and datagram, which approach requires less information in the packet
header?
4. Which of virtual circuit and datagram makes better utlization of the links
5. Which of virtual circuit and datagram will guarantee ordered delivery of packets in the absence of
any errors?
6. Which layer on the OSI model are host-to-host layers
7. What is the responsibility of netwrok layer in the OSI model
8. What does the various layers in the simplified TCP/IP protocl stack correspond to with respect to
the OSI seven-layer model?

Exercise/review questions on IP layer

1. How many bits are there in the IP address?

2. What the IP address specify?
3. What are the minimuim and maximum header sizes of an IP packet ?
4. Wht is the purpose of the “time to live ” field in the IP header ?
5. If the IP header is 192 bytes long, what will be the value of the “HELEN” field?
6. What is the maximum size of data that can be accommodated in an IP datagram?
7. An IP packet arrives at a router with the first eight bits as 01000011. The router discards
the packet. Why?
8. An IP packet arrives at a router with the first eight bits as 01001000. How many bytes of
options are there in the packet?
9. In an IP packet, the value of HLEN is 5, and the value of the total length field is 1000.
How many bytes of data the packet is carrying?
10. A packet has arrived at the destination with the M bit as zero. What can you say about the
packet?
11. A packet has arrived at the destination with the M bits as one, and also fragment offset
field as zero. What can you say about the packet?
 12. A packet has arrived at the destination with the HLEN value as 5, the fragment offset
field as 150, and the total length field as 2000. What can you say about the packet?
13. An IP packet with 2500 bytes of data (plus header) passes through an IP network with
MTU =500. How many additional bytes will be delivered at the destination?

Exercise questions on TCP/UDP layer

1. What does the port number in a TCP connection specify?

2. Why is the necessary to have both IP address and port number in a packet?
3. Which of the layer TCP, UDP and IP provides for reliable communication?
4. Both UDP and IP transmit datagrams. In what ways are they differ?
5. What are well-known port numbers?
6. What are ephemeral port numbers
7. With respect to a transport level connection, what are the five components in a an association?
8. Why is the pseudo-header used in calculating TCP checksum?
9. What are the different fields in the pseudo header
10. Suppose that 5000 bytes are transferred over TCP. The first byte is numbered 20050. what are the
sequence number for each segments if data is sent in four segments with the first two segments
carrying 1000 bytes and the last two segments carrying 1500 bytes
11. What is the purpose of the PSH flag in TCP header?
12. What is the purpose of ACK flag in the TCP header

Exercise/Review questions on IP addressing and subneting

1. Change the following IP address from binary notation to dotted decimal notation
11000100 10001111 00110000 10000001
2. Find the error if any in the IP address: 144.15.256.7
3. Find the class of the IP address: 227.15.75.111
4. Given the network address, 135.75.0.0, find the class, the network ID and the range of the
addresses
5. For the subnet mask 255.255.192.0, how many hosts per subnet are passible?
6. To classful addressing, if we are using the subnet mask 255.255.192.0, which address class does
it correspond to?
7. What is the subnet address if destination IP address is 144.16.34.124 and the subnet mask is
255.255.240.0?
8. What is the natural mask for a class c network?
 9. Using VLSM, give a scheme to split a class c address into four subnet where the number of hosts
required are 100, 55, 20,30
10. Can the following be the beginning addresses in CIDR based addressing
a. 1.44.16.192.32/28
b. 10.17.18.42/28
c. 188.15.170.55/28
d. 200.0.100.80/28
11. For a CIDR address of the form W.X.Y.Z/20 what is the maximum number of hosts possible in
the network?
12. Which of the following can be the starting address of a CIDR block that contains 512 addresses?
a. 144.16.24.128
b. 144.16.24.0
c. 144.16.75.0
d. 144.16.0.0

Exercise/Review questions on Address mapping

1. What is the different between logical and physical addressing

2. What is address resolution protocol (ARP)? How it works?
3. Write three mechanisms for Mapping Physical to Logical Address
4. Explain the difference between RARP, BOOTP, and DHCP in terms of working principles and
advantages and limitations

Exercise/Review questions on congestion

1. What is congestion? Why congestion occurs?

2. What are the two basic mechanisms of congestion control?
3. What is Backpressure congestion control? how is it is used for congestion control
4. What is choke packet? how is it is used for congestion control
5. How congestion control is performed by leaky bucket algorithm?
6. In what way token bucket algorithms is superior to leaky bucket algorithm?
7. Explain TCP Congestion control with example

Exercise/Review questions on routing

1. Why routing is important in a packet switched network?

2. What are the primary conditions that affect routing?
3. What is statistic routing? Advantages and limitations?
4. What is flooding? Why flooding techniques is not commonly used for routing?
5. In what situation flooding is most appropriate? How the drawbacks of flooding can be
minimized?
6. Why dynamic routing is preferred over static routing?
7. What are the limitations of dynamic routing?
8. Compare and contrast distance vector routing with link state routing
9. Based on the given figure find the least cost path to send data from node A to all other nodes
a) Using Dijkstra’s algorithm
b) Using Bellman Foard algorithm

Figure 1
10. What is the difference between interior and exterior routing protocols?
11. What is hierarchical routing?
12. What is an autonomous system?
13. How do routers update information in RIP?
14. What is the difference between OSPF and MOSPF
15. What are the four types of BGP messages?
16. How is a BGP connection between two routers maintained?