ECE 578 12/12/13 Lab 4 Switched LANs Hubs and Switches are components used to interconnect hosts.

. They are structured as follow: Hubs are half duplex and repeaters, meaning that they forward packets to all the ports without considering the destination of the packet. Therefore, there is a high likelihood of collision occurring that needs to be mediated by the CSMA/CS mechanism. On the other hand switches are full duplex, meaning that they forward packets to the proper destination. In summary, switch ports connected to hosts create a single collision domain as opposed to a multiple collision domain. Some other interesting factors regarding switches are that the output has finite bandwidth, leading to the potential of a contention problem, which would result in the discarding of the packets. This lab establishes a switched LAN using the two different switching devices.

Hub Only Network Topologies

Hub and Switch

1. After adding a switch to the network and running the simulation, we got the following results:

An analysis of the graphs shows that regardless of which topology is utilized, the traffic sent to the nodes is almost the same. This is because the hosts do not know which devices is sending packet to them. The next graph shows the traffic received to all the nodes. The switch traffic is slightly higher, since it is selectively forwarding traffic only to the port if the switch knows the MAC address of the host. This increases the throughput of the host in the switch network compared to just the hub. Looking at the average time delay, it is very obvious that the switch provides superior performance. This is due to the fact that the hub forwards packets to all the ports, which greatly increases the chances of collision. When a collision occurs the time required to recover from the collision is much higher in the hub scenario as compared to hub and switch scenario. After analyzing all the scenarios we created, it is apparent that the hub and switch topology is the better network. 2. As the switch has a buffer, no collisions will occur, making it impossible to analyze its collision count. Instead, we could look at the number of packets lost at the switch.

3. The performance of all the four scenarios is compared in terms of delay, throughput and collision count:

When evaluating all four network topologies, it is evident that the hub only scheme results in the most collisions by far, with the rest being close to comparable in this respect. Additionally, with just a cursory examination, it is evident that the one hub network topology is the best under these parameters as it has the fewest collisions, least delay, and highest average speed. This is because the ports are full duplex resulting in no collisions.