ELEC 6181

Problem 1
What happens if host xyz.ece.concordia.ca and host www.ibm.com (by accident) get assigned the same
MAC address?

Problem 2
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using RTP-over-TCP to carry (a) video-on-demand, (b)
Internet phone calls, compared to RTP-over-UDP?

Problem 3

a) Explain using an example of a network configuration how an MPLS network in the core can support
QoS for senders from Intserv network to communicate with QoS receivers in other Intserv network at
the other side of the core network.
b) Repeat (a) with boundary networks as Diffserv networks instead of Intserv networks.

Problem 4

List advantages of Internet technology to provide telephony services to the current circuit-switched
networks.

Problem 5
(a) Identify “True” or “False” for the following:
1. Echo becomes a problem in packet networks because the delay is almost always greater than 50 milliseconds
2. With MPLS, IP routers must interrogate each IP header before forwarding to the next hop
3. Firewalls analyze traffic at all layers of TCP/IP stack
4. MPLS is independent of the Layer-2 and Layer-3 protocols being used
5. Label swapping in MPLS occurs only at the edges of the network—i.e., at the LERs only
6. Packet loss can be caused by congestion, router changes as a result of inoperative network links, and occasions on
which a packet experiences a large delay in the network and arrives too late to be used in reconstructing the signal.
7. VADs generally operate on the receive side of a gateway and can often adapt to varying levels of noise versus voice

(b) Identify the correct answer:

1) VPNs
a. use the public Internet infrastructure to create a VPN
b. are more secure than traditional WANs due to data encryption
c. are not susceptible to Internet weaknesses and outages
2) Label merging in MPLS is used for
a. merging traffic on different interfaces headed for different destinations
b. merging traffic on different interfaces headed for the same destination
c. a and b
3) MPLS applications include
a. network scalability
b. traffic engineering
c. improving network interoperability and efficiency
d. all of the above
4) Voice quality is comprised of three factors: clarity, delay, and ____.
a. jitter
b. signal-to-noise ratio
c. echo
d. silence suppression
5) A QoS issue unique to packet networks is _______________.
a. interworking
b. compression
c. jitter
6) Developers seeking to incorporate voice-over-packet technology face which of the following challenges?
a. still-evolving technical standards
 b. network phenomena such as delay, jitter, echo, and lost packets
c. integration of incompatible technologies
d. all of the above

Problem 6

What are the advantages and disadvantages of sender- and receiver-based resource reservation?

Problem 7

Explain briefly how RSVP may be used to establish Label Switched Paths for MPLS networks.

Problem 8
Compare the operation of the layer 3 entities in the end systems and in the routers inside the network.

Problem 9

An audiovisual real-time application uses packet switching to transmit 32 kilobit/second speech and 64 kilobit/second
audio over the following network connection.

1 km 3000 km 1000 km 1 km
Workstation Switch 1 Switch 2 Switch 3 Workstation
10 Mbps 45 Mbps 45 Mbps 10 Mbps
. or 1.5 Mbps or 1.5 Mbps

Two choices of packet length are being considered: In option 1 a packet contains 10 milliseconds of speech and
audio information; in option 2 a packet contains 100 milliseconds of speech and audio information. Each packet
has a 40-byte header.

(a) For each option find out what percentage of each packet is header overhead.

(b) Draw a time diagram and identify all the components of the end-to-end delay. Keep in mind that a packet cannot be sent
until it has been filled and that a packet cannot be relayed until it is completely received (that is, store and forward). Assume
that bit errors are negligible.

(c) Evaluate all the delay components for which you have been given sufficient information. Consider both choices of packet
length. Assume that the signal propagates at a speed of 1 km /5 microseconds. Consider two cases of backbone network speed:
45 Mbps and 1.5 Mbps. Summarize your result for the four possible cases in a table with four entries.

(d) Which of the preceding delay components would involve queueing delays?

Problem 10

Suppose that a datagram packet-switching network has a routing algorithm that generates routing tables so that there
are two disjoint paths between every source and destination that is attached to the network. Identify the benefits of this
arrangement. What problems are introduced with this approach?

Problem 11

An IP packet consists of 20 bytes of header and 1500 bytes of payload. Now suppose that the packet is mapped into ATM cells
that have 5 bytes of header and 48 bytes of payload. How much of the resulting cell stream is header overhead?

Problem 12

Explain the difference between the leaky bucket traffic shaper and the token bucket traffic shaper.

Problem 13
Explain how the soft-state feature of RSVP allows it to adapt to failures in the network.