Q1 a) Compare and contrast Circuit Switching and Packet Switching.

Include in your answer the following topics: (i) Virtual Circuits (ii) Network Utilization (iii) Statistical Multiplexing Gain (iv) Quality of Service In order to build a virtual circuit, call setup is required for circuit switching, fixed path determined at call setup time, remains fixed thru call. And for packet switching, each packet carries tag (virtual circuit ID), tag determines next hop. There is no sharing with line for circuit switching, and packet switching use the shared line. Generally, the utilization of packet switching is higher than circuit. In packet switching, packets from different sources do not have fixed pattern, so it gain statistical multiplexing on it. There is no statistical multiplexing on circuit switching. Although packet switching can support more users, but the packet delay is high and the existing packet loss problem make the QoS of packet switching is not as good as circuit switching. b) Consider a message that is 7.5 x 106 bits long. Suppose that between source and destination there are two packet switches and three links and that each link has a transmission rate of 1.5Mbps. (i) Assuming that there is no congestion in the network, how much time is required to move the message from source to destination with message switching? It takes the source 5 seconds (7.5*106/1.5mbps) to move the message from the source to the first switch. Because the switches use store and forward transmission, and there are 3 links, so it takes 15 seconds (5*3 seconds) to move the message from source to destination with message switching.

(ii) Suppose that the source breaks the message into 5000 packets with each packet being 1500 bits long. Again assuming that there is no congestion in the network how long does it take to move the 5,000 packets from source to destination? The first packet takes 1 msec to move the first packet from the source to the first switch. And it takes 1 msec to move the first packet from the first switch to the second switch, meanwhile the second packet reaches the first switch at time = 2msec. The last packet is completely received at the first switch at time = 1*5000msec = 5sec. Since the last packet still has 2 more links, so the last is received by the destination at 5.002 seconds.

Q2 Explain the flaw in the following reasoning: Packet switching requires control and address bits to be added to each packet. This introduces considerable overhead in packet switching. In circuit switching, a transparent circuit is established. No extra bits are needed. Therefore, there is no overhead in circuit switching. Because there is no overhead in circuit switching, line utilization must be more efficient than in packet switching. Use an example to complement your answer. Define the following parameters for a switching network: N= the number of hops between two given end systems L= the message length in bits B=data rate, in bits per second(bps) on all links P=fixed packet size in bits H=overhead (header) bits per packet S=call setup time (circuit switching or virtual circuit) in seconds

D = propagation delay per hop in seconds For N=4, L=4032, B=9600,P=1024,H=16,S=0.2, D=0.001, compute the end-to-end delay for circuit switching, message switching, and datagram packet switching. Assume that there are no acknowledgments. Ignore processing delay at the nodes.

Though circuit switching has no overhead, but a link has to be built for only two peers, once there are less data or even no data transfer on the link, the line utilization will not as high as packet switching. For packet switching, although there are overhead for each packet, when a source does not have data to send, it will not be allocated bandwidth, and the bandwidth is available for other sources. In practice, there are always packets of different sources running on the line. So the utilization of packet switching is much higher than circuit switching. CS: L/B+S+D*N=432/9600+0.2+0.001*4=0.249 PS: (D+P/B)*(L/ (P-H)) + (D+P/B)*(N-1) = (0.001+1024/9600)*(4032/(1024-16))+(0.001+1024/9600)*(4-1) =0.4307+0.323 =0.7537 MS: (D+L/B)*N= (0.001+4032/9600)*4=1.684

Q3 (a)What information is used by a process running on one host to identify a process running on another host? The IP address of the destination hosts and the port numbers of the destination socket. (b)Describe why Web caching can reduce the delay in receiving a requested object. By storing previously retrieved objects, Web caching can reduce object-retrieval delays and diminish the amount of Web traffic sent over the Internet. A Web cache can substantially reduce the response time for a client request, particularly if the bottleneck bandwidth between the client and the origin server is much less than the bottleneck bandwidth between the client and the cache. If there is a high-speed connection between the client and the cache, as there often is, and if the cache has the requested object, then the cache will be able to rapidly deliver the object to the client. (c)Compare the operation of HTTP persistent and HTTP non-persistent connections. In your answer discuss the impact of each method on the operation of the transport protocol for the connection. In HTTP non-persistent connections, each TCP connection is closed after the server sends the object -- the connection does not persist for other objects. Note that each TCP connection transports exactly one request message and one response message. Non-persistent connections have some shortcomings. First, a brand new connection must be established and maintained for each requested object. For each of these connections, TCP buffers must be allocated and TCP variables must be kept in both the client and server. This can place a serious burden on the Web server, which may be serving requests from hundreds of different clients simultaneously. Second, as we just described, each object suffers two RTTs -- one RTT to establish the TCP connection and one RTT to request and receive an object. Finally, each object suffers from TCP slow start because every TCP connection begins with a TCP slow-start phase. However, the accumulation of RTT and slow start delays is partially alleviated by the use of parallel TCP connections.

With persistent connections, the server leaves the TCP connection open after sending responses. Subsequent requests and responses between the same client and server can be sent over the same connection. In particular, an entire Web page (in the example above, the base HTML file and the ten images) can be sent over a single persistent TCP connection; moreover, multiple Web pages residing on the same server can be sent over one persistent TCP connection. (d)Adaptive applications are designed to adapt to the currently available bandwidth and to variations in packet delay experienced in the network. Discuss the impact of adaptive applications on the Quality of Service the user experiences. Due to human perceptual factors, those minimal levels of bandwidth are not very useful, so that at low bandwidths the marginal utility of additional bandwidth is fairly small. Similarly, at high bandwidths the signal quality is quite good and so the marginal utility of additional bandwidth at high bandwidths is also small. At intermediate levels, when the signal quality first starts to be viable, the marginal utility of extra bandwidth is significant.