National Institute of Technology

Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering

EC 3023 Computer Networks
Problem Sheet #2 (05 February 2016)
1. A 3000-km-long T1 trunk is used to transmit a 64-byte frame. Assume the propagation
speed is 6musec/km (6 x 10^(-6) sec/km). (Note that the data rate for T1 carrier is
1.544Mbps)
a. If using stop-and-wait protocol, calculate the efficiency of the protocol. (Assume the
transmission time for the acknowledgement can be ignored.)
b. If go-back-N protocol is used, in order to achieve an efficiency of 100%, what is the
maximum window size at the sender's side? What is the maximum number of bits of
the sequence number?
2. Selective repeat dilemma: Two scenarios are given below describing a potential
problem that selective repeat protocol might cause when the window size and the
sequence number bit are not correctly specified. Study these two scenarios and discuss
what kind of problem they have caused. This is the reason that the following rule is
specified for SRQ: The window size must be less than or equal to half the size of the
sequence-number space.

3. Consider building a CSMA/CD network running at 1 Gbps over a 1-km cable with no
repeaters. The signal speed in the cable is 200,000 km/sec. What is the minimum frame
size?
4. For a 10-Mbps LAN with a maximum length of 2500 meters and four repeaters (802.3
specifications), the round-trip propagation delay has been determined to be nearly 50
musec in the worst case, including the time to pass through the repeaters. What is the
 smallest frame size? Explain how 512 bits or 64 bytes minimum Ethernet frame size
comes from
5. After a collision, time is divided into discrete slots whose length is equal to 512 bit times,
or 51.2 musec. Each station needs to wait K slots in order to transmit again, where K is a
random number obtained using exponential backoff. Suppose nodes A and B are on the
same 10 Mbps Ethernet segment and the propagation delay between the two nodes is 225
bit times. Suppose both A and B send frames at the same time, the frames collide, and
then A and B choose different values of K in the CSMA/CD algorithm. Assuming no
other nodes are active, can the retransmissions from A and B collide?
6. The pipelined protocols, also known as sliding window protocols, are a type of ARQ
(Automatic Repeat Request) protocols that use a window to control the amount of data
they inject into the network.
a. What is the window size in stop-and-wait ARQ? How many unique sequence
numbers does Stop-and-Wait need? How many bits are needed to represent Stop-and-
Waits unique sequence numbers? Explain.
b. What is the main advantage of requiring a smaller number of bits to represent the
range of unique sequence numbers employed by a protocol?
c. For a 100Mbits/sec channel with 100ms propagation delay, what is the channel
utilization when sending 2KByte frames if Stop-and-Wait is used?
d. How can you increase channel utilization 10-fold?
e. Describe the additional complexity of your solution compared to Stop-and-Wait
7. Suppose that a sender and a receiver are using ARQ to perform reliable data delivery.
a. In a Go-Back-N ARQ protocol, the window size is 6. Frames with sequence numbers
1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 have been sent. The sender just received an ACK for frame 1. Frames
6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are waiting to be sent. Draw the time diagram showing this scenario.
b. Which frame(s) can the sender send before it must wait for the next ACK from the
receiver? Explain.
c. Sometime later, the sender transmitted frames 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, and 26; however,
frame 22 got lost. If Go-Back-N is used, what frame(s) would the sender have to
retransmit? Explain.
d. Suppose the same situation as above but sender and receiver use Selective-Repeat
ARQ. What frame(s) would the sender need to retransmit? Explain.
8. Ethernet frames must be at least 64 bytes long to ensure that the transmitter can detect
collisions. A faster Ethernet has the same minimum frame size but can transmit 10 times
faster. How is it possible to still detect collisions?
9. A group of N stations share a 56kbps pure ALOHA channels. Each station outputs a
1000bit frame on an average of once every 100 sec, even if the previous one has not yet
been send (e.g. the stations are buffered). What is the maximum value of N?
10. Assume a 100Mbps link of 10,000meters in length with 5 nanoseconds per meter
propagation delay. Assume constant length 400 byte data frames, 64 byte ACK frames,
10 microsecond of processing delay for each data frame, and 5 microseconds of
processing time for each ACK. The sender always has data to send. Solve for link
utilization (U) between a sender and a receiver assuming a stop and wait protocol
11. Suppose you are designing a sliding window protocol for a 1-Mbps point-to-point link to
the stationary satellite revolving around the Earth at an altitude of 310^4 km. Assuming
that each frame carries 1 KB of data, what is the minimum number of bits you need for
the sequence number in the following cases? Assume the speed of light is 310^8 m/s.
(a) RWS=1
(b) RWS=SWS