Chapter Five

Local Area Networking Technology

 Local Area Network
• is a computer network covering a small physical area,
like a home, office, or small group of buildings, such as
a school, or an airport
• It is a group of computers and associated devices that
share a common communications line or wireless link
• The defining characteristics:
– Their higher data-transfer rates (typically 10 mbps to few
gbps),
– smaller geographic range, and
– single ownership.
• may serve as few as two or three users (for example, in a
home network) or as many as thousands of users (for
example, in an FDDI network).
• there are two basic types: Wired and Wireless
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• LAN networks share the characteristic of being packet
broadcasting networks
• The key technology ingredients that determine the nature of a
LAN are:
– Topology
– Transmission medium
– Medium access control technique
• Protocols defined specifically for LAN transmission address
issues relating to the transmission of blocks of data over the
network
• Because sharing occurs:
– Cost decreases
– Computers have to coordinate the use of the network
• LANs operate at the physical and data link layers
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• In OSI terms, higher layer protocols (layer 3 or 4 and
above) are independent of network architecture and are
applicable to LANs, MANs, and WANs
• LAN protocols is concerned principally with lower
layers (Layer 1 and 2) of the OSI model
• IEEE 802 reference model

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• the lowest layer of the IEEE 802 reference model corresponds to the
physical layer
• Includes functions as
– Encoding/decoding of signals
– Preamble generation/removal (for synchronization)
– Bit transmission/reception
• Above the physical layer are the functions associated with providing
service to LAN users (Data Link Layer). These include
– On transmission, assemble data into a frame with address and error-
detection fields.
– On reception, disassemble frame, perform address recognition and error
detection.
– Govern access to the LAN transmission medium.
– Provide an interface to higher layers and perform flow and error control
• The set of functions in the last bulleted item are grouped into a logical
link control (LLC) layer.
• The functions in the first three bullet items are treated as a separate
layer, called medium access control (MAC).
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 Access Methods
• broadcast channels are sometimes referred to as multiaccess
channels or random access channels
• The methods that can be used to determine how the shared
media is accessed are called Access methods
• The protocols used to determine who goes next on a
multiaccess channel belong to a sublayer of the data link
layer called the MAC (Medium Access Control) sublayer
• The MAC sublayer is especially important in LANs, many of
which use a multiaccess channel as the basis for
communication.
• WANs, in contrast, use point-to-point links, except for
satellite networks
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• Pure ALOHA
– The earliest of access methods
– was developed for packet radio networks
– it is also applicable to any shared transmission medium
– is a true free-for-all
– The station waits for an amount of time (The maximum round-
trip propagation delay on the network)
• twice the time it takes to send a frame between the two most
widely separated stations
• plus a small fixed time increment
– If the station fails to receive an acknowledgment after repeated
transmissions, it gives up
– Collision happens if two stations send frame at the same time
– ALOHA is as simple as can be, and pays a penalty for it
– Because the number of collisions rises rapidly with increased
load, the maximum utilization of the channel is only about 18%
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• Slotted ALOHA
– time on the channel is organized into uniform slots whose
size equals the frame transmission time
– Some central clock or other technique is needed to
synchronize all stations
– Transmission is permitted to begin only at a slot boundary
– still collision is possible; collided packet are
retransmitted after a random delay

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• CSMA - Carrier Sense MA - polite version of ALOHA
 Both ALOHA and slotted ALOHA
 exhibit poor utilization
 fail to take advantage of one of the key properties of both packet
radio and LANs,
 Very small propagation delay between stations compared to
frame transmission time
• The maximum utilization depends on
• the length of the frame and
• on the propagation time
• the longer the frames or the shorter the propagation time,
the higher the utilization
• an algorithm is needed to specify what a station should do if the
medium is found busy

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• The most common approach, and the one used in IEEE 802.3, is
the 1-persistent technique
• A station wishing to transmit listens to the medium and obeys the
following rules:
1. If the medium is idle, transmit; otherwise, go to step 2.
2. If the medium is busy, continue to listen until the channel is sensed
idle; then transmit immediately.
 if a collision occurs, it waits a random amount of time and
starts listening again
 the chance of collision is minimized, but may still occur
because of the propagation delay (a station doesn’t know if
another one has just started transmitting); or if two or more
stations start transmitting at the same time

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 t1 < t2 < t3 < t4 < t5

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 Two sub-strategies have been defined
 Non-persistent: sense a line and send if it is idle; otherwise wait a
random amount of time (hence less greedy than continuously
listening); reduces the chance of collision, but also reduces the
efficiency of the network and has longer delays

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 persistent: sense a line and “send” if it is idle; otherwise listen; two
variations
 1-persistent: if the line is idle, send
immediately (with probability 1)
 p-persistent: if the line is idle, send
with probability p and refrain from
sending with probability 1-p; if p =
0.2, then a station sends 20% of the
time that a line is idle, and refrains
from sending 80% of the time

 it reduces the chance of collision and improves efficiency; depends

on the value of p

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• CSMA/CD - CSMA with Collision Detection
– When two frames collide, the medium remains unusable
for the duration of transmission of both damaged frames
– rules for CSMA/CD:
1. If the medium is idle, transmit; otherwise, go to step 2.
2. If the medium is busy, continue to listen until the
channel is idle, then transmit immediately.
3. If a collision is detected during transmission, transmit a
brief jamming signal and then cease transmission.
4. After transmitting the jamming signal, wait a random
amount of time, then attempt to transmit again. (Repeat
from step 1.)

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 adds a procedure to handle a collision
 if a collision is detected and to reduce the probability of
collision the second time, the sender waits; it has to back
off
 it waits a little the first time, more if a collision occurs
again, much more if it happens a third time, and so on;
finally gives up
 in the exponential back off method, it waits an amount of
time between 0 and 2N x maximum_propagation_time,
where N is the number of attempted transmissions
 line sensing is done using one of the persistent strategies

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 sending a jam alerts the other stations and also to discard the
part of the frame received
 used in traditional Ethernet; CSMA was never implemented16
• CSMA/CA - CSMA with Collision Avoidance
 avoids collision
 uses one of the persistence strategies;
 once the channel is clear, a station sends a signal
telling all other stations not to transmit, and then sends
its packet
 after it finds the line idle, it waits an IFG (inter-frame
gap) amount of time;
 it then waits another random amount of time;
 after that it sends the frame and sets a timer;
 if it receives an ack before the timer expires, the
transmission is successful; otherwise something is
wrong (the frame or the ack is lost); waits for a back
off amount of time and re-senses the line
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• used in wireless LANs because
• Wireless LAN is not possible to listen while sending, therefore
collision detection is not possible
• the hidden terminal problem, whereby a node A, in range of the
receiver R, is not in range of the sender S, and therefore cannot
know that S is transmitting to R

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 19
 the frame or the ack is lost
• Token Passing
 A token is a special control frame on token ring, token bus,
and FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface) networks
 a station is authorized to send data when it receives a token
 workstations on token-based networks do not compete for
access to the network
 a station takes possession of a token and changes one bit,
converting the token to a SFS (start-of-frame sequence)
 A field exists in the token in which workstations can indicate
the type of priority required for the transmission
 The main advantage of token-passing networks is that they are
deterministic
 it is easy to calculate the maximum time that will pass before a
device has the opportunity to send data
 popular networks in some real-time environments such as
factories, where machinery must be capable of communicating
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at a determinable interval.
  the stations are arranged around a ring (each station has a
predecessor and a successor)
 a token circulates around the ring when no data is transmitted
 token: a bit sequence
 free token: 01111110
 busy token: 01111111
 when a node wants to transmit
 wait for free token
 remove token from ring (replace with busy token)
 transmit message
 when done transmitting, replace free token on ring

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2/27/2023 22
  token failures: tokens can be created or destroyed by noise
 distributed solution
 nodes are allowed to recognize the loss of a token and create
a new token
 collision occurs when two or more nodes create a new token
at the same time => need collision resolution algorithms
 node failures: since each node must relay all incoming data, the
failure of a single node will disrupt the operation of the ring

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 Ethernet
• also known as IEEE 802.3 standard
• is a data transmission standard for LAN
• It is a Carrier Sense Multiple Access transmission method
• It is the most common LAN technology today well suited for any
and all types of applications and the cost of such a network is not
very high
• Different variants of Ethernet technologies are distinguished
according to the type and diameter of the cables used.
1. Traditional Ethernet (IEEE 802.3)
 the most popular LAN physical network architecture in use today
 originally created in 1976 at Xerox’s Palo Alta Research Center (not
a commercial success for itself) to operate at 10 Mbps (usually called
traditional Ethernet)
 traditional Ethernet uses 1-persistent CSMA/CD
 an Ethernet frame contains 7 fields
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 to alert the recieving system to the coming frame

Data and
Padding

 PDU - Protocol Data Unit

 minimum and maximum frame lengths are defined (without the
preamble and the SFD)
 padding is used if the packet size is less than the minimum packet
size

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 addressing
 a NIC provides a 6-byte physical address (or MAC- Media Access
Control address) in hexadecimal; there are 248 possible LAN addresses;
a NIC’s address is permanent - a LAN address is burned into its ROM
during manufacturing

 Unicast, Multicast, and Broadcast addresses: a source address is

always a unicast address; the destination address can be unicast (only
one destination), multicast (multiple destinations), or broadcast (all the
stations on the network - 48 1s)

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 four most common kinds of 10 Mbps Ethernet cabling

 10 - 10 Mbps
 Base - Baseband (against broadband with more bandwidth than
standard telephone service)
 5 (2) - maximum segment length; rounded to units of 100 meters (for
coax)
 T - twisted pair, F - Fiber
 a hub is used in 10Base-T and 10Base-F to which each station is
connected by a dedicated cable
 10Base5 is also called Thick Ethernet and 10Base2 Thin Ethernet
 10Base5 and 10Base2 use bus topology; 10Base-T and 10Base-F use
star topology
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 Segmentation (of a network not a frame)
 performance depends on the number of stations
 the more stations we have the less will be the performance
 when a lot of stations have data to transmit, the network gets
congested, and many collisions occur (in a network with severe
congestion, there may actually be more collisions occurring on the
network than data being transmitted)
 one solution: Segmentation
 the process of splitting a large Ethernet network into two or more
segments linked by routers
 the resulting segments have fewer stations to contend with for
access to the network and the router transfers data from one
segment to the other only when the destination for the data is on
the other segment
 the rest of the network traffic stays within the segment where it
belongs 28
 Fast Ethernet (IEEE 802.3z)
 the need for a higher data rate resulted in the design of the Fast
Ethernet protocol (100 Mbps)
 basic idea: keep all the old frame formats, interfaces, and
procedural rules, but just reduce the bit time from 100 ns (10
Mbps) to 10 ns (100 Mbps)
 a new feature, called auto-negotiation, is added to allow
 incompatible devices to communicate with one another, e.g.
one with 10 Mbps and one with 100 Mbps - backward
compatibility)
 one device to have multiple capabilities
 a station to check a hub’s capabilities
 the three most common kinds of Fast Ethernet cabling

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 Gigabit Ethernet (IEEE 802.3u)
 recent need for an even higher data rate resulted in the design of
the Gigabit Ethernet protocol (1000 Mbps)
 basic idea: make Ethernet go 10 times faster yet remain backward
compatible with all existing Ethernet standards
 the four most common kinds of Gigabit Ethernet cabling

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Token Bus (IEEE 802.4) - proposed by General Motors
 it has ring logical topology and bus physical topology
 it uses token passing medium access control protocol
 each participating station knows the address of its predecessor
(previous station- PS) and successor (next station - NS)
 the logical ring is created and maintained dynamically in such
a way that the stations are logically ordered in numerically
descending order of MAC address
 except that the station with the lowest address is followed by
the station with the highest address

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 10 20 30 40 50 60

 in the example, stations 60, 50, 30, and 10, in that order, are part of
the logical ring
 station 60 passes the token to 50, which in turn passes it to 30,
then to 10, then back to 60;
 stations 20 and 40 are not part of the logical ring

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 the token bus system requires considerable maintenance;
 one or more stations must perform the following functions,
at minimum:
 addition to the ring: periodically nonparticipating
stations must be granted the opportunity to join the
logical ring
 deletion from the ring: a station can remove itself from
the logical ring
 ring initialization: when the network is started, some
procedure is needed to sort out who goes first, who goes
second, and so on
 token recovery: if the token is lost due to a
transmission error or station failure, some means of
recovery is needed

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 Token Ring (IEEE 802.5) - by IBM in early 1980’s
 has ring logical topology; the physical topology can be ring
or star
 it uses token passing medium access control protocol
 It is the preferred method of networking by IBM
 The goal of IBM's version of Token Ring was
 to facilitate a simple wiring structure using twisted-pair cable
that connects a computer to the network through a wall socket
 with the main wiring located in a centralized location
 Users are part of a ring, but they connect to it through a hub
• A Token Ring network includes the following features:
• Star-wired ring topology
• Token-passing access method
• Shielded and unshielded twisted-pair (IBM Types 1, 2, and 3)
cabling
• Transfer rates of 4 and 16 Mbps
• Baseband transmission 34
 FDDI
 Stands for Fiber Distributed Data Interface
 consists of two fiber rings, one transmitting clockwise and the
other transmitting counterclockwise.
 It is commonly used in network backbones.
 If either one break, the other can be used as a backup.
 If both break at the same point, by accident, the two rings can be
joined into a single ring approximately twice as long.
 Not an IEEE standard but confirms to it.
 MAC: Modified token passing.
 Physical Cable: Fiber Optics
 Topology: Ring (both logical & physical)
 Speed: 100mbs +

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• FDDI was developed for two primary reasons:
– to support and help extend the capabilities of older LANs, such as
Ethernet and Token Ring, and
– to provide a reliable infrastructure for businesses moving even
mission-critical applications to networks
• FDDI is more than LAN but less than WAN
• it is often used to connect high-end devices, such as mainframes,
minicomputers, and peripherals, or to connect high-performance
devices within a LAN
• over shorter distances (about 100 meters, or 330 feet), FDDI can also
be implemented on less expensive copper cable
• FDDI supports different types of cable
• FDDI topology and operation are similar to Token Ring, except that
FDDI is primarily based on optical transmission
• Using both rings to carry data means that twice as many frames can
circulate at the same time,
• therefore, the speed of the network can double—from 100 Mbps to
200 Mbps
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 • FDDI token passing
– works much the way it does on a Token Ring network
– fault tolerance
• When a node on the ring detects a problem, it generates a
frame known as a beacon and sends it on to the network
• As neighboring nodes detect the beacon, they too begin to
transmit beacons
• When the node that started the process eventually receives its
own beacon back,
• it then assumes that the problem has been isolated or resolved,
generates a new token, and starts once again
• cannot include rings longer than 100 kilometers apiece
• FDDI network cannot support more than 500 nodes per ring
• It is relatively expensive to implement

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 LAN Components
1. NIC - Network Interface Card
 amplifies electronic signals
 packages data for transmission
 physically connects a computer to the transmission
medium
2. Transmission Media - actually below the physical layer, but
controlled by it
 two categories
 guided (wired) - copper wire (twisted-pair cable,
coaxial cable) and fiber-optic cable
 unguided (wireless) - terrestrial radio, microwave,
satellite - signals broadcast through air
 comparison factors: bandwidth, delay, cost, ease of
installation and maintenance
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 Twisted-Pair Cable
 consists of two insulated copper wires - one to carry signals and the
other to serve as a ground reference. The receiver uses the
difference between the two levels. If the two wires are equally
affected by noise or crosstalk, the receiver is immune (the
difference is zero). The twisting is important here
 repeaters needed for longer distances
 bandwidth depends on the thickness of the wire and distance
 two important varieties for computer communications

(a) Category 3 UTP (Unshielded Twisted Pair) (b) Category 5 UTP - more twists per cm

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 EIA (Electronic Industries Association) developed standards
to classify UTP cables; 7 categories - Category 1 to
Category 7; 1 with the lowest quality and 7 the highest.
Classification based on bandwidth, data rate, whether it can
carry analog, digital or both signals, and use (telephone,
LANs)
 STP - shielded twisted pair - by IBM where a metal foil
covers each insulated wire. Bulkier and expensive; hence not
used outside of IBM

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(source: Microsoft Networking Essentials)
 Coaxial Cable
 better shielding than twisted pair  can span longer distances
at higher speeds bandwidth dependent on cable quality,
length, … - close to 1 GHz for modern cables
 stiff copper wire at the core, surrounded by an insulating
material in turn covered by a cylindrical conductor, then by a
protective plastic sheath

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• Fiber-Optic Cable
• three key components

– the light source (on one end): a pulse of light indicates a

1 bit, absence of light indicates a 0 bit
– the transmission medium: an ultra-thin fiber or glass
– the detector (on the other end): generates an electrical
pulse when light falls on it
• at the center is a glass core through which the light propagates; it is
surrounded by a glass cladding with a lower index of refraction than
the core to keep all the light in the core; then comes a thin plastic
jacket to protect the cladding (Fig. a)
• fibers are typically grouped in bundles, protected by an outer sheath
(Fig. b)
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 side view of a single fiber end view of a sheath with three fibers

 advantages of fiber optic cables

 repeaters required only about every 50 km (saves cost)
 not affected by power surge, electromagnetic interference,…
 do not leak light and difficult to tap - security
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• Connectors
RJ 45 connectors

BNC connectors

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45