Ethernet

• IEEE- Institute of Electrical and Electronics

Engineers is a professional association.

• IEEE has standardized a no. of LANs and MANs

under the name of IEEE 802.

• The most important is IEEE 802.3 (Ethernet)

and 802.11(Wireless LAN)

• 802.15 is Bluetooth and 802.16 is wireless MAN.

 IEEE standards
• 802.3: Ethernet

• 802.11: Wireless LAN

• 802.15: Bluetooth

• 802.16: Wireless MAN

 Ethernet- IEEE 802.3
• The name Ethernet refers to cable.
• 4 types of cabling are commonly used.

Type Cable Max Seg. Nodes/seg Remark

10Base5: Thick coax 500m 100 Original cable
10Base2: Thin Coax 185 m 30 No hub Needed
10BaseT: Twisted Pair 100 m 1024 cheapest system
10BaseF: Fiber Optics 2000m 1024 Best between buildings
 Ethernet cabling
• Cabling (5, 2, T, F, S, L)
– 5 - Thick coax (original Ethernet cabling)
– 2 – Thin Ethernet
– F – Optical fiber
– S – Short wave laser over multimode fiber
– L – Long wave laser over single mode fiber
 Ethernet cabling
• 10 Base5
– Thick Ethernet.

– Its like yellow garden hose with marking every 2.5

meters.

– Connections to it are generally made using Vampire

taps, in which a pin is very carefully forced halfway
into the coaxial cable’s core.

– 10 base5 means it operates at 10 Mbps

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 Ethernet cabling
10 Base 5
• First no is speed in Mbps.
• Base indicate baseband transmission.
• 5 - Thick coax

10 Base 2
• Thin Ethernet which can bend easily.
• Thin ethernet is much cheaper and easier to install.
• It can run only 185 meters per segment, each of which
can handle only 30 machines.

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 Ethernet cabling
10 Base T
• Central Hub to which all the twisted pair cables are
connected electrically.

10 Base F
• Fiber optics are used
• Expensive.
• .

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Ethernet cabling

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 Encoding
• Ordinary binary encoding techniques cant
determine the start , end or middle of each bit
without reference to external clock.
• So two techniques are used:
– Manchester encoding
– Differential Manchester encoding

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 Manchester Encoding
• Each bit period is divided into two equal intervals.
• Binary 1=> voltage set high during first interval
and low during second interval
• Binary 0=> Reverse of the above.
i.e first low and then high.

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 Differential Manchester Encoding
• Here also each bit period is divided into two equal
intervals.
• A 1 bit is indicated by the absence of a transition
at the start of the interval.
• A 0 bit is indicated by the presence of a transition
at the start of the interval.
• This scheme requires more complex equipments
but offers better noise immunity.

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 Frame Format

DIX= (DEC, Intel, Xerox) frame structure

• Preamble – 8 byte, each containing the bit pattern
10101010
• 6 byte destination and source address- The higher order
bit of the destination address is a 0 for ordinary addresses
and 1 for group addresses.
– Group addresses allow multiple stations to listen to a
single address.
– When a frame is sent to a group address, all the stations in
the group receive it.
– Sending to a group of stations is called multicast.
– The address consisting of all 1 bits is reserved for
broadcast.
– A frame containing all 1s in the destination filed is
accepted by all stations on the network.
• Type field- tells the receiver what to do with the frame
(2byte).
• Data filed- 0-1500 bytes
– When the transceiver detects a collision, it truncates the
current frame- means, stray bits and pieces of frames
appear on the cable all the time.

– To make it easier to distinguish valid frame from garbage,

Ethernet requires that valid frames must be at least 64
bytes long, from destination address to checksum.

– If the data portion of a frame is less than 46 bytes, the pad

field is used to fill out the frame to the minimum size.
• Data filed- 0-1500 bytes
– More important reason for having a minimum length frame
is to prevent the station from completing the transmission
of a short frame before the first bit has ever reached the
far end of the cable, where it may collide with another
frame.

– At time0, station A sends a frame.

– Propagation time is τ
– When station B detects the collision, it abort the
transmission and generates a 48 bit noise burst to warn all
other stations.
– At about 2τ, sender sees the noise burst and aborts its
transmission too.
• Pad filed- 0-46 bytes
Frames with fewer than 64 bytes are padded
out to 64 bytes with the pad field.
• Checksum- 4 bytes
-32 bit hash code of the date.
- if some data bits are erroneously received,
checksum will be wrong and the error will be
detected.
• In IEEE 802.3 format, the committee made 2 changes to
the DIX format.

– 1. Reduce the preamble to 7 bytes and use the last byte for
a Start Of Frame delimiter.

– Change the Type filed into Length filed

 Binary Exponential Back off Algorithm
• Binary exponential backoff refers to a collision resolution
mechanism used in random access MAC protocols. This
algorithm is used in Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) wired LANs.

• In Ethernet networks, this algorithm is commonly used to

schedule retransmissions after collisions.

• After a collision, time is divided into discrete slots whose length

is equal to 2τ, where τ is the maximum propagation delay in the
network.
• The reason for this choice is that 2 τ is the minimum amount of
time a source needs to listen to the channel to detect a collision.
 Binary Exponential Back off Algorithm
• After the first collision, each station waits either 0 or 1 slot
time before trying again.

• If two stations collide and each one pick the same random
number, they will collide again.

• After the second collision, each one picks either 0,1,2, or 3 at

random and waits that no. of slot times.

• If a third collision occurs, then the next time, the no.of slots
to wait is chosen at random from the interval 23-1
 Binary Exponential Back off Algorithm
• In general,after i collision,a random number between
0 and 2i -1 is chosen and that no.of slots is skipped.

• After 10 collision,the randomization interval is frozen at a

maximum of 1023 slots.

• After 16 collision, a failure is reported.

 Fast and Gigabit Ethernet
• Fast Ethernet (100BASE-T)

• Fast Ethernet (100Mbps) has technology very similar to

10Mbps Ethernet
– Uses different physical layer encoding
– Many NIC’s are 10/100 capable
• Can be used at either speed
Fast Ethernet [IEEE 802.3u]
Three Choices

original fast Ethernet cabling.

 Fast Ethernet
• 100 Base T4
– Can use four separate twisted pairs of Cat 3 UTP
– Utilize three pair in both directions (at 33 1/3 Mbps) with other
pair for carrier sense/collision detection.

• 100 BASE TX
• Uses two pair of twisted pair, one pair for transmission and one
pair for reception.

• 100 BASE FX
-Uses two optical fibers, one for transmission and one for
reception. Networks: Fast Ethernet 26
 Gigabit Ethernet(1000BASE X)
• Gigabit Ethernet (1,000Mbps)
– Compatible with lower speeds
– Uses standard framing and CSMA/CD algorithm
– Distances are severely limited
– Typically used for backbones and inter-router
connectivity