Lecture #14: Local Area Networks

ALOHA
Ethernet
Token Ring
Token Bus
Medium Access Control sublayer

• Networks can be divided into two categories:

those using point-to-point connections and those using broadcast
channels.

• In any broadcast network, the key issue is how to determine who

gets to use the channel when there is competition for it.

• The protocols used to determine who goes next on a multiaccess

channel belong to a sublayer of the data link layer (DLL) 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.

• Technically said, the MAC sublayer is the bottom part of the DLL.

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The Channel Allocation Problem

The Channel Allocation Problem

• How to allocate a single broadcast channel among several competing
users!?

• Static Channel Allocation in LANs and MANs

• Allocating a single channel, such as a telephone trunk, among multiple
competing users is Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM). If there
are N users, the bandwidth is divided into N equal-sized portions, each
user being assigned one portion. Since each user has a private
frequency band, there is no interference between users.

• When the number of senders is large and continuously varying or the

traffic is bursty, FDM presents some problems. If more than N users
want to communicate, some of them will be denied permission for lack
of bandwidth.

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Dynamic Channel Allocation in LANs and MANs

• Assumptions:
• Station Model. The model consists of N independent stations (e.g.,
computers, telephones, or personal communicators), each with a
program or user that generates frames for transmission. Stations
are sometimes called terminals. The probability of a frame being
generated in an interval of length Dt is l*Dt, where l is a constant
(the arrival rate of new frames). Once a frame has been
generated, the station is blocked and does nothing until the frame
has been successfully transmitted.

• Single Channel Assumption. A single channel is available for all

communication. All stations can transmit on it and all can receive
from it. As far as the hardware is concerned, all stations are
equivalent, although protocol software may assign priorities to
them.

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Dynamic Channel Allocation in LANs and MANs
(2)

• Assumptions:
• Collision Assumption. If two frames are transmitted
simultaneously, they overlap in time and the resulting signal is
garbled. This event is called a collision. All stations can detect
collisions. A collided frame must be transmitted again later. There
are no errors other than those generated by collisions.

• Continuous Time. Frame transmission can begin at any instant.

There is no master clock dividing time into discrete intervals.

• Slotted Time. Time is divided into discrete intervals (slots). Fram

transmissions always begin at the start of a slot. A slot may
contain 0 or more frames, corresponding to an idle slot, a
successful transmission, or a collision, respectively.

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Dynamic Channel Allocation in LANs and MANs (3)

• Assumptions:
• Carrier Sense. Stations can tell if the channel is in use before trying to use it. If the
channel is sensed as busy, no station will attempt to use it until it goes idle.

• No Carrier Sense. Stations cannot sense the channel before trying to use it. They just go
ahead and transmit. Only later can they determine whether the transmission was
successful.

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ALOHA
• ALOHA - a ground-based radio broadcasting
system. Many uncoordinated users are competing
for the use of a single shared channel.

• In the 1970s, Norman Abramson and his colleagues

at the University of Hawaii devised a new and
elegant method to solve the channel allocation
problem.

• Two versions of ALOHA: pure and slotted.

Pure ALOHA does not require global time
synchronization; slotted ALOHA does.
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Pure ALOHA

• The basic idea: Users transmit whenever they have data

to be sent.
• The Sender can always find out whether its frame was
destroyed by listening to the channel, the same way
other users do.
• With a LAN, the feedback is immediate (almost);
with a satellite, there is a delay of 270 msec before the
sender knows if the transmission was successful.
• If listening while transmitting is not possible for some
reason, acknowledgements are needed.
• If the frame was destroyed, the sender just waits a
random amount of time and sends it again.
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Pure ALOHA (2)

Frames are transmitted at completely arbitrary times.

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Pure ALOHA (3)

• Whenever two frames try to occupy the channel at the same time, there will be a
collision and both will be garbled. Both will have to be retransmitted later.

• The checksum cannot (and should not) distinguish between a total loss and a near miss.

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Slotted ALOHA

• The method: Divide time into discrete intervals, each interval corresponding to one
frame.

• A special station emits a pip at the start of each interval, like a clock.

• A user is not permitted to send whenever a special chcaracter (for example: CR) is
typed. Instead, it is required to wait for the beginning of the next slot.

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ALOHA systems comparison

Throughput versus offered traffic for ALOHA systems.

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Carrier Sense Multiple Access Protocols

• With slotted ALOHA the best channel utilization that can be achieved is 1/e. Stations
transmitting at will, without paying attention to what the other stations are doing =>
many collisions.

• In LAN, however, it is possible for stations to detect what other stations are doing, and
adapt their behavior accordingly => much better utilization than 1/e.

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Carrier Sense Multiple Access Protocols (2)

• Protocols in which stations listen for a carrier (i.e., a transmission) and act
accordingly are called carrier sense protocols.

• Many stations can attempt to transmit at a time – multiple access.

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CSMA types:persistent and nonpersistent

• 1-persistent: When a station has data to send, it first listens to the channel to see if
anyone else is transmitting at that moment. If the channel is busy, the station waits until
it becomes idle. When the station detects an idle channel, it transmits a frame. If a
collision occurs, the station waits a random amount of time and starts all over again.
The protocol is called 1-persistent because the station transmits with a probability of 1
when it finds the channel idle.

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CSMA types: persistent and nonpersistent (2)

• Nonpersistent: Before sending, a station senses the channel. If no one else is sending, the
station begins doing so itself. However, if the channel is already in use, the station waits
a random period of time and then repeats the algorithm. Consequently, this algorithm
leads to better channel utilization but longer delays than 1-persistent CSMA.

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CSMA types: persistent and nonpersistent (3)

• p-persistent: It applies to slotted channels. When a

station is to send, it senses the channel. If it is idle, it
transmits with a probability p. With a probability
q = 1 - p, it defers until the next slot. If that slot is also
idle, it either transmits or defers again, with
probabilities p and q. This process is repeated until
either the frame has been transmitted or another station
has begun transmitting.
• In the latter case, the unlucky station acts as if there had
been a collision (i.e., it waits a random time and starts
again).
• If the station initially senses the channel busy, it waits
until the next slot and applies the above algorithm.
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CSMA types: persistent and nonpersistent

Comparison of the channel utilization versus

load for various random access protocols.
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CSMA with Collision Detection CSMA / CD)

• Rather than finish transmitting their frames, which are irretrievably garbled anyway,
the stations should abruptly stop transmitting as soon as the collision is detected.
Quickly terminating damaged frames saves time and bandwidth.

• This protocol, is the basis of the popular Ethernet LAN.

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CSMA / CD states

contention, transmission, or idle

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CSMA / CD details

• After a station detects a collision, it aborts its

transmission, waits a random period of time, and
then tries again, assuming that no other station
has started transmitting in the meantime. The
CSMA/CD model will consist of alternating
contention and transmission periods, with idle
periods occurring when all stations are quiet.

• Suppose that two stations both begin transmitting

at exactly time t0. The minimum time to detect the
collision is then just the time it takes the signal to
propagate from one station to the other.

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CSMA / CD details (2)

• The collision detection is an analog process! The station's

hardware must listen to the cable while it is transmitting and the
signal encoding must allow collisions to be detected (e.g., a
collision of two 0-volt signals may be impossible to detect). For
this reason, special encoding is commonly used.

• The sending station must continually monitor the channel,

listening for noise bursts that might indicate a collision. For this
reason, CSMA/CD with a single channel is inherently
a half-duplex system. It is impossible for a station to transmit and
receive frames at the same time because the receiving logic is in
use, looking for collisions during every transmission.

• No MAC-sublayer protocol guarantees reliable delivery. Even in

the absence of collisions, the receiver may not have copied the
frame correctly for various reasons (e.g., lack of buffer space or a
missed interrupt).
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Collision-Free Protocols

• The collisions affect the system performance, especially when the

cable is long and the frames are short. And CSMA/CD is not
universally applicable.
• Some protocols resolve the contention for the channel without an
collisions at all. Most of these are not currently used in major
systems, but in a rapidly changing field, having some protocols
with excellent properties available for future systems is often a
good thing.

Assumptions:
 Tthere are exactly N stations, each with a unique address from 0
to N - 1 '‘hardcoded' into it.
 It does not matter that some stations may be inactive part of the
time.
 The propagation delay is negligible.
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Ethernet

• IEEE has standardized a number of LANs and MANs under the name of IEEE 802. A
few have survived but many have not.
• The most important of the survivors are 802.3 (Ethernet) and 802.11 (wireless LAN)
• For 802.15 (Bluetooth) and 802.16 (wireless MAN), it is too early to tell.
• Both 802.3 and 802.11 have different physical layers and different MAC sublayers but
converge on the same logical link control sublayer (defined in 802.2), so they have the
same interface to the network layer.

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Ethernet Cabling

Name Cable Max seg. Nodes per Advantage

(m) segment s

10Base5 thick 500 100 The

coax Original
10Base2 thin coax 185 30 no hub

10Base-T twisted 100 1024 cheapest

pair
(UTP)
10Base-F fiber 2000 1024 long
distance
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Three kinds of Ethernet cabling

10Base5 10Base2 10Base-T

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Cable topologies

Linear Spine (bus) Tree Segmented

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Ethernet frame formats

IEEE 802.3 DIX (DEC, Intel, Xerox)

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Ethernet frame format
•Preamble: Sequence of 10101010s. 8 bytes.
(SOF, Start of Frame delimiter, for compatibility with 802.4 and 802.5)
•Addresses: 2 or 6 bytes.
• high-order bit of the destination address:
– 0 for ordinary addresses
– 1 for group addresses.
• bit 46 - global or local address.
Type: specifies which process to give the frame to.
(Any number <=1500 is treated as length or as type otherwise.)
•Data: up to 1500 bytes.
•Pad: (optional) The frame must be at least 64 bytes in total!
•Checksum: CRC based on this polynomial:
x32+x26+x23+x22+x16+x12+x11+x10+x8+x7+x5+x4+x2+x+1
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Token Ring – IEEE 802.5

• A ring toplogy network developed in the late 1960s. Supported mainly by IBM.
Pushed into the background by Ethernet in the 1990s.
• a LAN protocol which resides at the data link layer (DLL) of the OSI model.

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Cabling and speed

• Shielded Twisted Pair with

unique hermaphroditic
connectors (IBM “Type 1”)
or
• Symmetric pair.

• Speed:
– 4 Mbps (1985)
– 16 Mpbs (1989, IBM)

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Token Ring operation

• When nobody is transmitting a token circles.

• When a station needs to transmit data, it converts the token into a data frame.
• When the sender receives its own data frame, it converts the frame back into a token.
• If an error occurs and no token frame, or more than one, is present, a special station
(“Active Monitor”) detects the problem and removes and/or reinserts tokens as
necessary.
• The Abort frame: used to abort transmission by the sending station.

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Token Bus – IEEE 802.4

• A network which implements the modified Token Ring protocol over a "virtual ring"
on a coaxial cable with a bus topology.
• It is mainly used for industrial applications (GM®).

1 1 1

1 1

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Plan of talk

• History & Development

• Introduction
• FDDI Features
• Working of FDDI
• FDDI Types
• Frame Format
• Applications of FDDI
• Advantages
• Future of FDDI
• Conclusion

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History & Development

 FDDI was considered an attractive campus backbone

technology in the early to mid 1990s since existing Ethernet
networks only offered 10 Mbit/s transfer speeds and Token
Ring networks only offered 4 Mbit/s or 16 Mbit/s speeds.
 Thus it was the preferred choice of that era for a high-
speed backbone, but FDDI has since been effectively
obsoleted by fast Ethernet which offered the same
100 Mbit/s speeds, but at a much lower cost and, since
1998, by Gigabit Ethernet due to its speed, and even lower
cost, and ubiquity.

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Introduction

 FDDI LAN standards were developed by subcommittee

X3T9.5 of ANSI (American National Standard Institute)
 A networking technology that uses a dual ring topology
often with dual networking equipment (concentrators, etc.)
 FDDI facilitates redundancy and protection of the
network.
 If a device fails, the primary and secondary rings enter a
"wrap" state to form a logical connection and thus
maintain the logical ring in the event of a link failure.
 FDDI is capable of data rates of 100 Mbps over fiber optic
cable (SMF and MMF).

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FDDI Features

 Can be implemented over copper (CDDI)

 The fiber optic cables have clear advantages over the copper
cables. There is more security, and the fiber optic cables are
more reliable than any other wire available.
 The data transfer in the fiber optic cable takes place without
any electrical signals being transmitted.
 The data flow is undeterred and constant through a fiber
optic cable.
 Long distances can be covered for data flow using the fiber
optic cable using a single node.
 Maximum of 500 stations
 Media access - Token passing
 Speed - 100Mbps
 Frame Size is large as compared to Ethernet i.e. 4500 bytes
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Working of FDDI

 The inside architecture of the FDDI is based on the dual rings where the data
is flowing in the opposite directions.
 There are two levels of rings the primary and the secondary.
 Most of the data transmission takes place using the primary ring and the
secondary is idle.
 However in case the primary does not work the secondary takes over the
primary’s functionalities
 It also use optical bypass switch for avoiding the wrap

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FDDI TYPES

There are two types of fiber distributed data interface mainly.

• The Single Mode Interface

The single mode uses the laser technology to generate the
light
rays.

• The Multi Mode Interface.

The Multimode fiber uses the LED display to generate the
light rays.

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Cont…

 The difference in both these methods is that multi mode as

the name suggests allows many rays at one single point of
time to pass and the single mode laser allows one ray at one
time to pass through.
 The angles at which the light reflects on the cable are all
different so by the time they reach the nodes the time at
which they arrive is different. In a single mode there is no
such confusion so the data arrives at the node in a
streamlined fashion.
 The methodology which the multi mode uses is called modal
dispersion and it is used in an environment which has
limited boundaries.
 In comparison with the multi node the single node will be
able to carry more data and deliver at a higher speed along
with covering larger distances.
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Applications of FDDI

• FDDI is used mainly in mission critical and high traffic networks where large
amounts of data flow need to flow quickly and efficiently.

• FDDI is used anywhere that utilizes a large network in need of high

bandwidth. Businesses, the Government, hospitals and other medical fields,
stock exchanges and money markets etc.

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Advantages

 Higher Capacity and Performance than older LANs

 More Simultaneous Transactions
 Higher Availability (dual ring topology)
 Predetermined Performance (adding users have
minimal impact on throughput)
 Longer Distance Loops (2 kilometers to 100 kilometer)

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Future of FDDI

• A newer version of FDDI, called FDDI-2, supports the transmission of audio and
visual information as well as data.

• Another version, FDDI-Full Duplex Technology or FFDT, uses the same network
setup as FDDI but can support twice the data rate, or 200 Mbps.

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