E&CE 610, Winter 2013: Assignment #1

Instructor: Mohamed Mahmoud T.A. Ning Lu Email: mmabdels@bbcr.uwaterloo.ca n7lu@uwaterloo.ca Oce Hours: Tuesday 1:30-3:00 pm and Wednesday 3:30-5:00 pm

E&CE 610, Winter 2013 : Assignment #1

Problem 1
(Message Switching and Packet Switching ) Consider two hosts A and B separated by 2 nodes (switches or routers), A wants to send a le of size M = 15 Mbytes over to B. Each link has the same data rate C = 1.5 Mbit/s. a. Assume message switching, how long would it take for the whole le to be received by B? Explain your assumptions. Write rst the formula giving the time in terms of C , M , and possibly other parameters. b. Assume packet switching and that all packets have the same size L = 1200 bits, how long would it take for the whole le to be received by B? Explain your assumptions. Write rst the formula giving the time in terms of C , M , and possibly other parameters. Comment and compare.

Problem 2
(Delay ) This elementary problem begins to explore propagation delay and transmission delay, two central concepts in data networking. Consider two hosts, A and B, connected by a single link of rate R bps. Suppose that the two hosts are separated by m meters, and suppose the propagation speed along the link is s meters/sec. Host A is to send a packet of size L bits to Host B. a. Express the propagation delay, dprop , in terms of m and s. b. Determine the transmission time of the packet, dtrans , in term of L and R. c. Ignoring processing and queuing delays, obtain an expression for the end-to-end delay. d. Suppose Host A begins to transmit the packet at time t = 0. At time t = dtrans , where is the last bit of the packet? e. Suppose dprop is greater than dtrans . At time t = dtrans , where is the rst bit of the packet? f. Suppose dprop is less than dtrans . At time t = dtrans , where is the rst bit of the packet? g. Suppose s = 2.5 108 , L = 120 bits, and R = 56 kbps. Find the distance m so that dprop equals dtrans .

Problem 3
(Segmentation ) In modern packet-switched networks, the source host segments long, application-layer messages (for example, an image or a music le) into smaller packets and sends the packets into the network. The receiver then reassembles the packets back into the original message. We refer to this process as message segmentation. Fig. 1 illustrates the end-to-end transport of a message with and without message segmentation. Consider a message that is 8 106 bits long that is to be sent from source to destination in Fig. 1. Suppose each link in the gure is 2 Mbps. Ignore propagation, queuing, and processing delays. a. Consider sending the message from source to destination without message segmentation. How long does it take to move the message form the source host to the rst packet switch? Keeping in mind that each switch uses store-and-forward packet switching, what is the total time to move the message form source host to destination host? b. Now suppose that the message is segmented into 4,000 packets, with each packet being 2,000 bits long. How long does it take to move the rst packet from source host to the rst switch? When the rst packet is being sent form the rst switch to the second switch, the second packet is being sent form the source host to the rst switch. At what time will the second packet be fully received at the rst switch? c. How long does it take to move the le from source host to destination host when message segmentation is used? Compare this result with your answer in part (a) and comment. d. Discuss the drawbacks of message segmentation.

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E&CE 610, Winter 2013 : Assignment #1

Figure 1: End-to-end message transport: (a)without message segmentation; (b)with message segmentation

Problem 4
(Optimal Packet Size ) Consider two hosts A and B connected via n hops (n 2): A R1 R2 Rn1 B That is, R1 , . . . , Rn1 are routers, and A is connected to R1 by a point-to-point link, R1 is connected to R2 by a point-to-point link, and so on. Assume all links have the same capacity C (in bps). Also assume the propagation delay of the links to be negligible and that no packets from other hosts exist on the path from A to B (this is a very unrealistic assumption). Consider a le of size S (in bits) to be transmitted from A to B. a. How much time does it take to transmit a packet of size L from A to B? b. The optimal way to break up the le into packets, in order to minimize the total delay, is to divide it into a number of equal-sized packets (believe us!). How many packets is optimum? (Notice that when the packet is split into smaller packets, separate headers/trailers are added to each of the smaller packets. Assume the size of headers/trailers to be H for packets of any size.) Comment.

Problem 5
(Statistical Multiplexing ) Suppose users share a 2-Mbps link. Also suppose each user requires 300 Kbps when transmitting, but each user only transmits 12 percent of the time. a. When circuit switching is used, how many users can be supported? b. For the remainder of this problem, suppose packet switching is used. Find the probability that a given user is transmitting. c. Suppose there are 50 users. Find the probability that at any given time, n users are transmitting simultaneously. d. Find the probability that there are 6 or more users transmitting simultaneously.

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