The table for S2 might be as follows, where we have consolidated destinations A and C for visual simplicity.
S2 | |
---|---|
destination | next_hop |
A,C | 0 |
D | 1 |
E | 2 |
B | 3 |
In the network diagrammed above, all links are point-to-point, and so each interface corresponds to the unique immediate neighbor reached by that interface. We can thus replace the interface entries in the next_hop column with the name of the corresponding neighbor . For human readers, using neighbors in the next_hop column is usually much more readable. S1’s table can now be written as follows (with consolidation of the entries for B, D and E):
S1 | |
---|---|
destination | next_hop |
A | A |
C | C |
B,D,E | S2 |
A central feature of datagram forwarding is that each packet is forwarded “in isolation”; the switches involved do not have any awareness of any higher-layer logical connections established between endpoints. This is also called stateless forwarding, in that the forwarding tables have no per-connection state. RFC 1122 put it this way (in the context of IP-layer datagram forwarding):
To improve robustness of the communication system, gateways are designed to be stateless, forwarding each IP datagram independently of other datagrams. As a result, redundant paths can be exploited to provide robust service in spite of failures of intervening gateways and networks.
The fundamental alternative to datagram forwarding is virtual circuits , 5.4 Virtual Circuits . In virtual-circuit networks, each router maintains state about each connection passing through it; different connections can be routed differently. If packet forwarding depends, for example, on per-connection information – eg both TCP port numbers – it is not datagram forwarding. (That said, it arguably still is datagram forwarding if web traffic – to TCP port 80 – is forwarded differently than all other traffic, because that rule does not depend on the specific connection.)
Datagram forwarding is sometimes allowed to use other information beyond the destination address. In theory, IP routing can be done based on the destination address and some quality-of-service information, allowing, for example, different routing to the same destination for high-bandwidth bulk traffic and for low-latency real-time traffic. In practice, most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) ignore user-provided quality-of-service information in the IP header, except by prearranged agreement, and route only based on the destination.
By convention, switching devices acting at the LAN layer and forwarding packets based on the LAN address are called switches (or, originally, bridges; some still prefer that term), while such devices acting at the IP layer and forwarding on the IP address are called routers . Datagram forwarding is used both by Ethernet switches and by IP routers, though the destinations in Ethernet forwarding tables are individual nodes while the destinations in IP routers are entire networks (that is, sets of nodes).
In IP routers within end-user sites it is common for a forwarding table to include a catchall default entry, matching any IP address that is nonlocal and so needs to be routed out into the Internet at large. Unlike the consolidated entries for B, D and E in the table above for S1, which likely would have to be implemented as actual separate entries, a default entry is a single record representing where to forward the packet if no other destination match is found. Here is a forwarding table for S1, above, with a default entry replacing the last three entries:
S1 | |
---|---|
destination | next_hop |
A | 0 |
C | 1 |
default | 2 |
Default entries make sense only when we can tell by looking at an address that it does not represent a nearby node. This is common in IP networks because an IP address encodes the destination network, and routers generally know all the local networks. It is however rare in Ethernets, because there is generally no correlation between Ethernet addresses and locality. If S1 above were an Ethernet switch, and it had some means of knowing that interfaces 0 and 1 connected directly to individual hosts, not switches – and S1 knew the addresses of these hosts – then making interface 2 a default route would make sense. In practice, however, Ethernet switches do not know what kind of device connects to a given interface.
In the network diagrammed in the previous section, there are no loops; graph theorists might describe this by saying the network graph is acyclic , or is a tree . In a loop-free network there is a unique path between any pair of nodes. The forwarding-table algorithm has only to make sure that every destination appears in the forwarding tables; the issue of choosing between alternative paths does not arise.
However, if there are no loops then there is no redundancy : any broken link will result in partitioning the network into two pieces that cannot communicate. All else being equal (which it is not, but never mind for now), redundancy is a good thing. However, once we start including redundancy, we have to make decisions among the multiple paths to a destination. Consider, for a moment, the following network:
Fig. 4: A network with more than one path from A to B
Should S1 list S2 or S3 as the next_hop to B? Both paths A─S1─ S2 ─S4─B and A─S1─ S3 ─S4─B get there. There is no right answer. Even if one path is “faster” than the other, taking the slower path is not exactly wrong (especially if the slower path is, say, less expensive). Some sort of protocol must exist to provide a mechanism by which S1 can make the choice (though this mechanism might be as simple as choosing to route via the first path discovered to the given destination). We also want protocols to make sure that, if S1 reaches B via S2 and the S2─S4 link fails, then S1 will switch over to the still-working S1─S3─S4─B route.
As we shall see, many LANs (in particular Ethernet) prefer “tree” networks with no redundancy, while IP has complex protocols in support of redundancy ( 13 Routing-Update Algorithms ).
In some cases the decision above between routes A─S1─S2─S4─B and A─S1─S3─S4─B might be of material significance – perhaps the S2–S4 link is slower than the others, or is more congested. We will use the term traffic engineering to refer to any intentional selection of one route over another, or any elevation of the priority of one class of traffic. The route selection can either be directly intentional, through configuration, or can be implicit in the selection or tuning of algorithms that then make these route-selection choices automatically. As an example of the latter, the algorithms of 13.1 Distance-Vector Routing-Update Algorithm build forwarding tables on their own, but those tables are greatly influenced by the administrative assignment of link costs.
With pure datagram forwarding, used at either the LAN or the IP layer, the path taken by a packet is determined solely by its destination, and traffic engineering is limited to the choices made between alternative paths. We have already, however, suggested that datagram forwarding can be extended to take quality-of-service information into account; this may be used to have voice traffic – with its relatively low bandwidth but intolerance for delay – take an entirely different path than bulk file transfers. Alternatively, the network manager may simply assign voice traffic a higher priority, so it does not have to wait in queues behind file-transfer traffic.
The quality-of-service information may be set by the end-user, in which case an ISP may wish to recognize it only for designated users, which in turn means that the ISP will implicitly use the traffic source when making routing decisions. Alternatively, the quality-of-service information may be set by the ISP itself, based on its best guess as to the application; this means that the ISP may be using packet size, port number ( 1.12 Transport ) and other contents as part of the routing decision. For some explicit mechanisms supporting this kind of routing, see 13.6 Routing on Other Attributes .
At the LAN layer, traffic-engineering mechanisms are historically limited, though see 3.4 Software-Defined Networking . At the IP layer, more strategies are available; see 25 Quality of Service .
A potential drawback to datagram forwarding is the possibility of a routing loop : a set of entries in the forwarding tables that cause some packets to circulate endlessly. For example, in the previous picture we would have a routing loop if, for (nonexistent) destination C, S1 forwarded to S2, S2 forwarded to S4, S4 forwarded to S3, and S3 forwarded to S1. A packet sent to C would not only not be delivered, but in circling endlessly it might easily consume a large majority of the bandwidth. Routing loops typically arise because the creation of the forwarding tables is often “distributed”, and there is no global authority to detect inconsistencies. Even when there is such an authority, temporary routing loops can be created due to notification delays.
Routing loops can also occur in networks where the underlying link topology is loop-free; for example, in the previous diagram we could, again for destination C, have S1 forward to S2 and S2 forward back to S1. We will refer to such a case as a linear routing loop.
All datagram-forwarding protocols need some way of detecting and avoiding routing loops. Ethernet, for example, avoids nonlinear routing loops by disallowing loops in the underlying network topology, and avoids linear routing loops by not having switches forward a packet back out the interface by which it arrived. IP provides for a one-byte “Time to Live” (TTL) field in the IP header; it is set by the sender and decremented by 1 at each router; a packet is discarded if its TTL reaches 0. This limits the number of times a wayward packet can be forwarded to the initial TTL value, typically 64.
In datagram routing, a switch is responsible only for the next hop to the ultimate destination; if a switch has a complete path in mind, there is no guarantee that the next_hop switch or any other downstream switch will continue to forward along that path. Misunderstandings can potentially lead to routing loops. Consider this network:
Fig. 5: Network consisting of five nodes in a ring
D might feel that the best path to B is D–E–C–B (perhaps because it believes the A–D link is to be avoided). If E similarly decides the best path to B is E–D–A–B, and if D and E both choose their next_hop for B based on these best paths, then a linear routing loop is formed: D routes to B via E and E routes to B via D. Although each of D and E have identified a usable path , that path is not in fact followed. Moral: successful datagram routing requires cooperation and a consistent view of the network.
Switches introduce the possibility of congestion: packets arriving faster than they can be sent out. This can happen with just two interfaces, if the inbound interface has a higher bandwidth than the outbound interface; another common source of congestion is traffic arriving on multiple inputs and all destined for the same output.
Whatever the reason, if packets are arriving for a given outbound interface faster than they can be sent, a queue will form for that interface. Once that queue is full, packets will be dropped . The most common strategy (though not the only one) is to drop any packets that arrive when the queue is full.
The term “congestion” may refer either to the point where the queue is just beginning to build up, or to the point where the queue is full and packets are lost. In their paper [CJ89] , Chiu and Jain refer to the first point as the knee ; this is where the slope of the load vs throughput graph flattens. They refer to the second point as the cliff ; this is where packet losses may lead to a precipitous decline in throughput. Other authors use the term contention for knee-congestion.
In the Internet, most packet losses are due to congestion. This is not because congestion is especially bad (though it can be, at times), but rather that other types of losses ( eg due to packet corruption) are insignificant by comparison.
When to Upgrade?
Deciding when a network really does have insufficient bandwidth is not a technical issue but an economic one. The number of customers may increase, the cost of bandwidth may decrease or customers may simply be willing to pay more to have data transfers complete in less time; “customers” here can be external or in-house. Monitoring of links and routers for congestion can, however, help determine exactly what parts of the network would most benefit from upgrade.
We emphasize that the presence of congestion does not mean that a network has a shortage of bandwidth. Bulk-traffic senders (though not real-time senders) attempt to send as fast as possible, and congestion is simply the network’s feedback that the maximum transmission rate has been reached. For further discussion, including alternative definitions of longer-term congestion, see [BCL09] .
Congestion is a sign of a problem in real-time networks, which we will consider in 25 Quality of Service . In these networks losses due to congestion must generally be kept to an absolute minimum; one way to achieve this is to limit the acceptance of new connections unless sufficient resources are available.
Perhaps the core justification for packets, Baran’s concerns about node failure notwithstanding, is that the same link can carry, at different times, different packets representing traffic to different destinations and from different senders. Thus, packets are the key to supporting shared transmission lines ; that is, they support the multiplexing of multiple communications channels over a single cable. The alternative of a separate physical line between every pair of machines grows prohibitively complex very quickly (though virtual circuits between every pair of machines in a datacenter are not uncommon; see 5.4 Virtual Circuits ).
From this shared-medium perspective, an important packet feature is the maximum packet size, as this represents the maximum time a sender can send before other senders get a chance. The alternative of unbounded packet sizes would lead to prolonged network unavailability for everyone else if someone downloaded a large file in a single 1 Gigabit packet. Another drawback to large packets is that, if the packet is corrupted, the entire packet must be retransmitted; see 7.3.1 Error Rates and Packet Size .
When a router or switch receives a packet, it (generally) reads in the entire packet before looking at the header to decide to what next node to forward it. This is known as store-and-forward , and introduces a forwarding delay equal to the time needed to read in the entire packet. For individual packets this forwarding delay is hard to avoid (though some higher-end switches do implement cut-through switching to begin forwarding a packet before it has fully arrived), but if one is sending a long train of packets then by keeping multiple packets en route at the same time one can essentially eliminate the significance of the forwarding delay; see 7.3 Packet Size .
Total packet delay from sender to receiver is the sum of the following:
See 7.1 Packet Delay for more details.
A local-area network , or LAN, is a system consisting of
physical links that are, ultimately, serial lines common interfacing hardware connecting the hosts to the links protocols to make everything work together
We will explicitly assume that every LAN node is able to communicate with every other LAN node. Sometimes this will require the cooperation of intermediate nodes acting as switches.
Far and away the most common type of (wired) LAN is Ethernet, originally described in a 1976 paper by Metcalfe and Boggs [MB76] . Ethernet’s popularity is due to low cost more than anything else, though the primary reason Ethernet cost is low is that high demand has led to manufacturing economies of scale.
The original Ethernet had a bandwidth of 10 Mbps (megabits per second; we will use lower-case “b” for bits and upper-case “B” for bytes), though nowadays most Ethernet operates at 100 Mbps and gigabit (1000 Mbps) Ethernet (and faster) is widely used in server rooms. (By comparison, as of this writing (2015) the data transfer rate to a typical faster hard disk is about 1000 Mbps.) Wireless (“Wi-Fi”) LANs are gaining popularity, and in many settings have supplanted wired Ethernet to end-users.
Many early Ethernet installations were unswitched; each host simply tapped in to one long primary cable that wound through the building (or floor). In principle, two stations could then transmit at the same time, rendering the data unintelligible; this was called a collision . Ethernet has several design features intended to minimize the bandwidth wasted on collisions: stations, before transmitting, check to be sure the line is idle, they monitor the line while transmitting to detect collisions during the transmission, and, if a collision is detected, they execute a random backoff strategy to avoid an immediate recollision. See 2.1.5 The Slot Time and Collisions . While Ethernet collisions definitely reduce throughput, in the larger view they should perhaps be thought of as a part of a remarkably inexpensive shared-access mediation protocol.
In unswitched Ethernets every packet is received by every host and it is up to the network card in each host to determine if the arriving packet is addressed to that host. It is almost always possible to configure the card to forward all arriving packets to the attached host; this poses a security threat and “password sniffers” that surreptitiously collected passwords via such eavesdropping used to be common.
Password Sniffing
In the fall of 1994 at Loyola University I remotely changed the root password on several CS-department unix machines at the other end of campus, using telnet. I told no one. Within two hours, someone else logged into one of these machines, using the new password, from a host in Europe. Password sniffing was the likely culprit.
Two months later was the so-called “Christmas Day Attack” ( 18.3.1 ISNs and spoofing ). One of the hosts used to launch this attack was Loyola’s hacked apollo.it.luc.edu. It is unclear the degree to which password sniffing played a role in that exploit.
Due to both privacy and efficiency concerns, almost all Ethernets today are fully switched; this ensures that each packet is delivered only to the host to which it is addressed. One advantage of switching is that it effectively eliminates most Ethernet collisions; while in principle it replaces them with a queuing issue, in practice Ethernet switch queues so seldom fill up that they are almost invisible even to network managers (unlike IP router queues). Switching also prevents host-based eavesdropping, though arguably a better solution to this problem is encryption. Perhaps the more significant tradeoff with switches, historically, was that Once Upon A Time they were expensive and unreliable; tapping directly into a common cable was dirt cheap.
Ethernet addresses are six bytes long. Each Ethernet card (or network interface ) is assigned a (supposedly) unique address at the time of manufacture; this address is burned into the card’s ROM and is called the card’s physical address or hardware address or MAC (Media Access Control) address. The first three bytes of the physical address have been assigned to the manufacturer; the subsequent three bytes are a serial number assigned by that manufacturer.
By comparison, IP addresses are assigned administratively by the local site. The basic advantage of having addresses in hardware is that hosts automatically know their own addresses on startup; no manual configuration or server query is necessary. It is not unusual for a site to have a large number of identically configured workstations, for which all network differences derive ultimately from each workstation’s unique Ethernet address.
The network interface continually monitors all arriving packets; if it sees any packet containing a destination address that matches its own physical address, it grabs the packet and forwards it to the attached CPU (via a CPU interrupt).
Ethernet also has a designated broadcast address . A host sending to the broadcast address has its packet received by every other host on the network; if a switch receives a broadcast packet on one port, it forwards the packet out every other port. This broadcast mechanism allows host A to contact host B when A does not yet know B’s physical address; typical broadcast queries have forms such as “Will the designated server please answer” or (from the ARP protocol) “will the host with the given IP address please tell me your physical address”.
Traffic addressed to a particular host – that is, not broadcast – is said to be unicast .
Because Ethernet addresses are assigned by the hardware, knowing an address does not provide any direct indication of where that address is located on the network. In switched Ethernet, the switches must thus have a forwarding-table record for each individual Ethernet address on the network; for extremely large networks this ultimately becomes unwieldy. Consider the analogous situation with postal addresses: Ethernet is somewhat like attempting to deliver mail using social-security numbers as addresses, where each postal worker is provided with a large catalog listing each person’s SSN together with their physical location. Real postal mail is, of course, addressed “hierarchically” using ever-more-precise specifiers: state, city, zipcode, street address, and name / room#. Ethernet, in other words, does not scale well to “large” sizes.
Switched Ethernet works quite well, however, for networks with up to 10,000-100,000 nodes. Forwarding tables with size in that range are straightforward to manage.
To forward packets correctly, switches must know where all active destination addresses in the LAN are located; traditional Ethernet switches do this by a passive learning algorithm. (IP routers, by comparison, use “active” protocols, and some newer Ethernet switches take the approach of 3.4 Software-Defined Networking .) Typically a host physical address is entered into a switch’s forwarding table when a packet from that host is first received ; the switch notes the packet’s arrival interface and source address and assumes that the same interface is to be used to deliver packets back to that sender. If a given destination address has not yet been seen, and thus is not in the forwarding table, Ethernet switches still have the backup delivery option of flooding : forwarding the packet to everyone by treating the destination address like the broadcast address, and allowing the host Ethernet cards to sort it out. Since this broadcast-like process is not generally used for more than one packet (after that, the switches will have learned the correct forwarding-table entries), the risks of excessive traffic and of eavesdropping are minimal.
The ⟨host,interface⟩ forwarding table is often easier to think of as ⟨host,next_hop⟩, where the next_hop node is whatever switch or host is at the immediate other end of the link connecting to the given interface. In a fully switched network where each link connects only two interfaces, the two perspectives are equivalent.
To solve the scaling problem with Ethernet, and to allow support for other types of LANs and point-to-point links as well, the Internet Protocol was developed. Perhaps the central issue in the design of IP was to support universal connectivity (everyone can connect to everyone else) in such a way as to allow scaling to enormous size (in 2013 there appear to be around ~10 9 nodes, although IP should work to 10 10 nodes or more), without resulting in unmanageably large forwarding tables (currently the largest tables have about 300,000 entries.)
In the early days, IP networks were considered to be “internetworks” of basic networks (LANs); nowadays users generally ignore LANs and think of the Internet as one large (virtual) network.
To support universal connectivity, IP provides a global mechanism for addressing and routing , so that packets can actually be delivered from any host to any other host. IP addresses (for the most-common version 4, which we denote IPv4 ) are 4 bytes (32 bits), and are part of the IP header that generally follows the Ethernet header. The Ethernet header only stays with a packet for one hop; the IP header stays with the packet for its entire journey across the Internet.
An essential feature of IPv4 (and IPv6) addresses is that they can be divided into a network part (a prefix) and a host part (the remainder). The “legacy” mechanism for designating the IPv4 network and host address portions was to make the division according to the first few bits:
first few bits | first byte | network bits | host bits | name | application |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
0 | 0-127 | 8 | 24 | class A | a few very large networks |
10 | 128-191 | 16 | 16 | class B | institution-sized networks |
110 | 192-223 | 24 | 8 | class C | sized for smaller entities |
For example, the original IP address allocation for Loyola University Chicago was 147.126.0.0, a class B. In binary, 147 is 10 010011.
IP addresses, unlike Ethernet addresses, are administratively assigned . Once upon a time, you would get your Class B network prefix from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, or IANA (they now delegate this task), and then you would in turn assign the host portion in a way that was appropriate for your local site. As a result of this administrative assignment, an IP address usually serves not just as an endpoint identifier but also as a locator , containing embedded location information (at least in the sense of location within the IP-address-assignment hierarchy, which may not be geographical). Ethernet addresses, by comparison, are endpoint identifiers but not locators.
The Class A/B/C definition above was spelled out in 1981 in RFC 791 , which introduced IP. Class D was added in 1986 by RFC 988 ; class D addresses must begin with the bits 1110. These addresses are for multicast , that is, sending an IP packet to every member of a set of recipients (ideally without actually transmitting it more than once on any one link).
Nowadays the division into the network and host bits is dynamic, and can be made at different positions in the address at different levels of the network. For example, a small organization might receive a /27 address block (1/8 the size of a class-C /24) from its ISP, eg 200.1.130.96/ 27 . The ISP routes to the organization based on this /27 prefix. At some higher level, however, routing might be based on the prefix 200.1.128/ 18 ; this might, for example, represent an address block assigned to the ISP (note that the first 18 bits of 200.1.130.x match 200.1.128; the first two bits of 128 and 130, taken as 8-bit quantities, are “10”). The network/host division point is not carried within the IP header; routers negotiate this division point when they negotiate the next_hop forwarding information. We will return to this in 9.5 The Classless IP Delivery Algorithm .
The network portion of an IP address is sometimes called the network number or network address or network prefix . As we shall see below, most forwarding decisions are made using only the network prefix. The network prefix is commonly denoted by setting the host bits to zero and ending the resultant address with a slash followed by the number of network bits in the address: eg 12.0.0.0/8 or 147.126.0.0/16. Note that 12.0.0.0/8 and 12.0.0.0/9 represent different things; in the latter, the second byte of any host address extending the network address is constrained to begin with a 0-bit. An anonymous block of IP addresses might be referred to only by the slash and following digit, eg “we need a /22 block to accommodate all our customers”.
All hosts with the same network address (same network bits) are said to be on the same IP network and must be located together on the same LAN ; as we shall see below, if two hosts share the same network address then they will assume they can reach each other directly via the underlying LAN, and if they cannot then connectivity fails. A consequence of this rule is that outside of the site only the network bits need to be looked at to route a packet to the site .
Usually, all hosts (or more precisely all network interfaces) on the same physical LAN share the same network prefix and thus are part of the same IP network. Occasionally, however, one LAN is divided into multiple IP networks.
Each individual LAN technology has a maximum packet size it supports; for example, Ethernet has a maximum packet size of about 1500 bytes but the once-competing Token Ring had a maximum of 4 kB. Today the world has largely standardized on Ethernet and almost entirely standardized on Ethernet packet-size limits, but this was not the case when IP was introduced and there was real concern that two hosts on separate large-packet networks might try to exchange packets too large for some small-packet intermediate network to carry.
Therefore, in addition to routing and addressing, the decision was made that IP must also support fragmentation : the division of large packets into multiple smaller ones (in other contexts this may also be called segmentation ). The IP approach is not very efficient, and IP hosts go to considerable lengths to avoid fragmentation. IP does require that packets of up to 576 bytes be supported, and so a common legacy strategy was for a host to limit a packet to at most 512 user-data bytes whenever the packet was to be sent via a router; packets addressed to another host on the same LAN could of course use a larger packet size. Despite its limited use, however, fragmentation is essential conceptually, in order for IP to be able to support large packets without knowing anything about the intervening networks.
IP is a best effort system; there are no IP-layer acknowledgments or retransmissions. We ship the packet off, and hope it gets there. Most of the time, it does.
Architecturally, this best-effort model represents what is known as connectionless networking: the IP layer does not maintain information about endpoint-to-endpoint connections, and simply forwards packets like a giant LAN. Responsibility for creating and maintaining connections is left for the next layer up, the TCP layer. Connectionless networking is not the only way to do things: the alternative could have been some form connection-oriented internetworking, in which routers do maintain state information about individual connections. Later, in 5.4 Virtual Circuits , we will examine how virtual-circuit networking can be used to implement a connection-oriented approach; virtual-circuit switching is the primary alternative to datagram switching.
Connectionless (IP-style) and connection-oriented networking each have advantages. Connectionless networking is conceptually more reliable: if routers do not hold connection state, then they cannot lose connection state. The path taken by the packets in some higher-level connection can easily be dynamically rerouted. Finally, connectionless networking makes it hard for providers to bill by the connection; once upon a time (in the era of dollar-a-minute phone calls) this was a source of mild astonishment to many new users. (This was not always a given; the paper [CK74] considers, among other things, the possibility of per-packet accounting.)
The primary advantage of connection-oriented networking, on the other hand, is that the routers are then much better positioned to accept reservations and to make quality-of-service guarantees . This remains something of a sore point in the current Internet: if you want to use Voice-over-IP, or VoIP , telephones, or if you want to engage in video conferencing, your packets will be treated by the Internet core just the same as if they were low-priority file transfers. There is no “priority service” option.
The most common form of IP packet loss is router queue overflows, representing network congestion. Packet losses due to packet corruption are rare ( eg less than one in 10 4 ; perhaps much less). But in a connectionless world a large number of hosts can simultaneously attempt to send traffic through one router, in which case queue overflows are hard to avoid.
Although we will often assume, for simplicity, that routers have a fixed input queue size, the reality is often a little more complicated. See 21.5 Active Queue Management and 23 Queuing and Scheduling .
IP routers use datagram forwarding, described in 1.4 Datagram Forwarding above, to deliver packets, but the “destination” values listed in the forwarding tables are network prefixes – representing entire LANs – instead of individual hosts. The goal of IP forwarding, then, becomes delivery to the correct LAN; a separate process is used to deliver to the final host once the final LAN has been reached.
The entire point, in fact, of having a network/host division within IP addresses is so that routers need to list only the network prefixes of the destination addresses in their IP forwarding tables. This strategy is the key to IP scalability: it saves large amounts of forwarding-table space, it saves time as smaller tables allow faster lookup, and it saves the bandwidth and overhead that would be needed for routers to keep track of individual addresses. To get an idea of the forwarding-table space savings, there are currently (2013) around a billion hosts on the Internet, but only 300,000 or so networks listed in top-level forwarding tables.
With IP’s use of network prefixes as forwarding-table destinations, matching an actual packet address to a forwarding-table entry is no longer a matter of simple equality comparison; routers must compare appropriate prefixes.
IP forwarding tables are sometimes also referred to as “routing tables”; in this book, however, we make at least a token effort to use “forwarding” to refer to the packet forwarding process, and “routing” to refer to mechanisms by which the forwarding tables are maintained and updated. (If we were to be completely consistent here, we would use the term “forwarding loop” rather than “routing loop”.)
Now let us look at an example of how IP forwarding (or routing) works. We will assume that all network nodes are either hosts – user machines, with a single network connection – or routers , which do packet-forwarding only. Routers are not directly visible to users, and always have at least two different network interfaces representing different networks that the router is connecting. (Machines can be both hosts and routers, but this introduces complications.)
Suppose A is the sending host, sending a packet to a destination host D. The IP header of the packet will contain D’s IP address in the “destination address” field (it will also contain A’s own address as the “source address”). The first step is for A to determine whether D is on the same LAN as itself or not; that is, whether D is local . This is done by looking at the network part of the destination address, which we will denote by D net . If this net address is the same as A’s (that is, if it is equal numerically to A net ), then A figures D is on the same LAN as itself, and can use direct LAN delivery. It looks up the appropriate physical address for D (probably with the ARP protocol, 10.2 Address Resolution Protocol: ARP ), attaches a LAN header to the packet in front of the IP header, and sends the packet straight to D via the LAN.
If, however, A net and D net do not match – D is non-local – then A looks up a router to use. Most ordinary hosts use only one router for all non-local packet deliveries, making this choice very simple. A then forwards the packet to the router, again using direct delivery over the LAN. The IP destination address in the packet remains D in this case, although the LAN destination address will be that of the router.
When the router receives the packet, it strips off the LAN header but leaves the IP header with the IP destination address. It extracts the destination D, and then looks at D net . The router first checks to see if any of its network interfaces are on the same LAN as D; recall that the router connects to at least one additional network besides the one for A. If the answer is yes, then the router uses direct LAN delivery to the destination, as above. If, on the other hand, D net is not a LAN to which the router is connected directly, then the router consults its internal forwarding table. This consists of a list of networks each with an associated next_hop address. These ⟨net,next_hop⟩ tables compare with switched-Ethernet’s ⟨host,next_hop⟩ tables; the former type will be smaller because there are many fewer nets than hosts. The next_hop addresses in the table are chosen so that the router can always reach them via direct LAN delivery via one of its interfaces; generally they are other routers. The router looks up D net in the table, finds the next_hop address, and uses direct LAN delivery to get the packet to that next_hop machine. The packet’s IP header remains essentially unchanged, although the router most likely attaches an entirely new LAN header.
The packet continues being forwarded like this, from router to router, until it finally arrives at a router that is connected to D net ; it is then delivered by that final router directly to D, using the LAN.
To make this concrete, consider the following diagram:
Fig. 6: Two LANs (200.0.0 and 200.0.1) joined by three routers R1,R2,R3
With Ethernet-style forwarding, R2 would have to maintain entries for each of A,B,C,D,E,F. With IP forwarding, R2 has just two entries to maintain in its forwarding table: 200.0.0/24 and 200.0.1/24. If A sends to D, at 200.0.1.37, it puts this address into the IP header, notes that 200.0.0 ≠ 200.0.1, and thus concludes D is not a local delivery. A therefore sends the packet to its router R1, using LAN delivery. R1 looks up the destination network 200.0.1 in its forwarding table and forwards the packet to R2, which in turn forwards it to R3. R3 now sees that it is connected directly to the destination network 200.0.1, and delivers the packet via the LAN to D, by looking up D’s physical address.
In this diagram, IP addresses for the ends of the R1–R2 and R2–R3 links are not shown. They could be assigned global IP addresses, but they could also use “private” IP addresses. Assuming these links are point-to-point links, they might not actually need IP addresses at all; we return to this in 9.8 Unnumbered Interfaces .
One can think of the network-prefix bits as analogous to the “zip code” on postal mail, and the host bits as analogous to the street address. The internal parts of the post office get a letter to the right zip code, and then an individual letter carrier (the LAN) gets it to the right address. Alternatively, one can think of the network bits as like the area code of a phone number, and the host bits as like the rest of the digits. Newer protocols that support different net/host division points at different places in the network – sometimes called hierarchical routing – allow support for addressing schemes that correspond to, say, zip/street/user, or areacode/exchange/subscriber.
The Invertebrate Internet
The backbone is not as essential as it once was. Once Upon A Time, all traffic between different providers passed through the backbone. The legacy backbone still exists, but today it is also common for traffic from large providers such as Google to take a backbone-free path; such providers connect (or “peer”) directly with large residential ISPs such as Comcast . Google refers to this as their “Edge Network”; see peering.google.com and also 15.7.1 MED values and traffic engineering .
We will refer to the Internet backbone as those IP routers that specialize in large-scale routing on the commercial Internet, and which generally have forwarding-table entries covering all public IP addresses; note that this is essentially a business definition rather than a technical one. We can revise the table-size claim of the previous paragraph to state that, while there are many private IP networks, there are about 800,000 separate network prefixes (as of 2019) visible to the backbone. (In 2012, the year this book was started, there were about 400,000 prefixes.) A forwarding table of 800,000 entries is quite feasible; a table a hundred times larger is not, let alone a thousand times larger. For a graph of the growth in network prefixes / forwarding-table entries, see 15.5 BGP Table Size .
IP routers at non-backbone sites generally know all locally assigned network prefixes, eg 200.0.0/24 and 200.0.1/24 above. If a destination does not match any locally assigned network prefix, the packet needs to be routed out into the Internet at large; for typical non-backbone sites this almost always this means the packet is sent to the ISP that provides Internet connectivity. Generally the local routers will contain a catchall default entry covering all nonlocal networks; this means that the router needs an explicit entry only for locally assigned networks. This greatly reduces the forwarding-table size. The Internet backbone can be approximately described, in fact, as those routers that do not have a default entry.
For most purposes, the Internet can be seen as a combination of end-user LANs together with point-to-point links joining these LANs to the backbone, point-to-point links also tie the backbone together. Both LANs and point-to-point links appear in the diagram above.
Just how routers build their ⟨destnet,next_hop⟩ forwarding tables is a major topic itself, which we cover in 13 Routing-Update Algorithms . Unlike Ethernet, IP routers do not have a “flooding” delivery mechanism as a fallback, so the tables must be constructed in advance. (There is a limited form of IP broadcast, but it is basically intended for reaching the local LAN only, and does not help at all with delivery in the event that the destination network is unknown.)
Most forwarding-table-construction algorithms used on a set of routers under common management fall into either the distance-vector or the link-state category; these are described in 13 Routing-Update Algorithms . Routers not under common management – that is, neighboring routers belonging to different organizations – exchange information through the Border Gateway Protocol, BGP ( 14 Large-Scale IP Routing ). BGP allows routing decisions to be based on a fusion of “technical” information (which sites are reachable at all, and through where) together with “policy” information representing legal or commercial agreements: which outside routers are “preferred”, whose traffic an ISP will carry even if it isn’t to one of the ISP’s customers, etc .
Most common residential “routers” involve network address translation in addition to packet forwarding. See 9.7 Network Address Translation .
As mentioned earlier, allocation of blocks of IP addresses is the responsibility of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. IANA long ago delegated the job of allocating network prefixes to individual sites; they limited themselves to handing out /8 blocks (class A blocks) to the five regional registries , which are
As of the end of January 2011, the IANA finally ran out of /8 blocks. There is a table at http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml of all IANA assignments of /8 blocks; examination of the table shows all have now been allocated.
In September 2015, ARIN ran out of its pool of IPv4 addresses . Most of ARIN’s customers are ISPs, which can now obtain new IPv4 addresses only by buying unused address blocks from other organizations.
A few months after the IANA pool ran out in 2011, Microsoft purchased 666,624 IP addresses (2604 Class-C blocks) in a Nortel bankruptcy auction for $7.5 million. Three years later, IP-address prices fell to half that, but, by 2019, had climbed to the $20-and-up range. In that year Amazon bought a 4-million-address block (44.0.0.0/10) for $108 million, or $27/address. Prices remained in the $20 range through 2020, but by the end of 2021 had climbed to $50-$55, with several /19 blocks sold in January 2022 in that range. The market for IPv4 address blocks continues to develop, but the only real solution is widespread adoption of IPv6 with its plentiful 128-bit addresses.
An IPv4 address price in the range of $20-30 is unlikely to have much impact in residential Internet access, where annual connection fees are often $600. Large organizations use NAT ( 9.7 Network Address Translation ) extensively, leading to the need for only a small number of globally visible addresses. The IPv4 address shortage does not even seem to have affected wireless networking. It does, however, lead to inefficient routing tables, as sites that might once have had a single /17 address block – and thus a single backbone forwarding-table entry – might now be spread over more than a hundred /24 blocks and concomitant forwarding entries.
IP addresses are hard to remember (nearly impossible in IPv6). The domain name system , or DNS ( 10.1 DNS ), comes to the rescue by creating a way to convert hierarchical text names to IP addresses. Thus, for example, one can type www.luc.edu instead of 147.126.1.230. Virtually all Internet software uses the same basic library calls to convert DNS names to actual addresses.
One thing DNS makes possible is changing a website’s IP address while leaving the name alone. This allows moving a site to a new provider, for example, without requiring users to learn anything new. It is also possible to have several different DNS names resolve to the same IP address, and – through some modest trickery – have the http (web) server at that IP address handle the different DNS names as completely different websites.
DNS is hierarchical and distributed. In looking up cs.luc.edu four different DNS servers may be queried: for the so-called “DNS root zone”, for edu , for luc.edu and for cs.luc.edu . Searching a hierarchy can be cumbersome, so DNS search results are normally cached locally. If a name is not found in the cache, the lookup may take a couple seconds. The DNS hierarchy need have nothing to do with the IP-address hierarchy.
The IP layer gets packets from one node to another, but it is not well-suited to transport. First, IP routing is a “best-effort” mechanism, which means packets can and do get lost sometimes. Additionally, data that does arrive can arrive out of order. Finally, IP only supports sending to a specific host; normally, one wants to send to a given application running on that host. Email and web traffic, or two different web sessions, should not be commingled!
The Transport layer is the layer above the IP layer that handles these sorts of issues, often by creating some sort of connection abstraction. Far and away the most popular mechanism in the Transport layer is the Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP . TCP extends IP with the following features:
TCP endpoints are of the form ⟨host,port⟩; these pairs are known as socket addresses , or sometimes as just sockets though the latter refers more properly to the operating-system objects that receive the data sent to the socket addresses. Servers (or, more precisely, server applications) listen for connections to sockets they have opened; the client is then any endpoint that initiates a connection to a server.
When you enter a host name in a web browser, it opens a TCP connection to the server’s port 80 (the standard web-traffic port), that is, to the server socket with socket-address ⟨server,80⟩. If you have several browser tabs open, each might connect to the same server socket, but the connections are distinguishable by virtue of using separate ports (and thus having separate socket addresses) on the client end (that is, your end).
A busy server may have thousands of connections to its port 80 (the web port) and hundreds of connections to port 25 (the email port). Web and email traffic are kept separate by virtue of the different ports used. All those clients to the same port, though, are kept separate because each comes from a unique ⟨host,port⟩ pair. A TCP connection is determined by the ⟨host,port⟩ socket address at each end; traffic on different connections does not intermingle. That is, there may be multiple independent connections to ⟨www.luc.edu,80⟩. This is somewhat analogous to certain business telephone numbers of the “ operators are standing by ” type, which support multiple callers at the same time to the same toll-free number. Each call to that number is answered by a different operator (corresponding to a different cpu process), and different calls do not “overhear” each other.
TCP uses the sliding-windows algorithm , 8 Abstract Sliding Windows , to keep multiple packets en route at any one time. The window size represents the number of packets simultaneously in transit (TCP actually keeps track of the window size in bytes, but packets are easier to visualize). If the window size is 10 packets, for example, then at any one time 10 packets are in transit (perhaps 5 data packets and 5 returning acknowledgments). Assuming no packets are lost, then as each acknowledgment arrives the window “slides forward” by one packet. The data packet 10 packets ahead is then sent, to maintain a total of 10 packets on the wire. For example, consider the moment when the ten packets 20-29 are in transit. When ACK[20] is received, the number of packets outstanding drops to 9 (packets 21-29). To keep 10 packets in flight, Data[30] is sent. When ACK[21] is received, Data[31] is sent, and so on.
Sliding windows minimizes the effect of store-and-forward delays, and propagation delays, as these then only count once for the entire windowful and not once per packet. Sliding windows also provides an automatic, if partial, brake on congestion: the queue at any switch or router along the way cannot exceed the window size. In this it compares favorably with constant-rate transmission, which, if the available bandwidth falls below the transmission rate, always leads to overflowing queues and to a significant percentage of dropped packets. Of course, if the window size is too large, a sliding-windows sender may also experience dropped packets.
The ideal window size, at least from a throughput perspective, is such that it takes one round-trip time to send an entire window, so that the next ACK will always be arriving just as the sender has finished transmitting the window. Determining this ideal size, however, is difficult; for one thing, the ideal size varies with network load. As a result, TCP approximates the ideal size. The most common TCP strategy – that of so-called TCP Reno – is that the window size is slowly raised until packet loss occurs, which TCP takes as a sign that it has reached the limit of available network resources. At that point the window size is reduced to half its previous value, and the slow climb resumes. The effect is a “sawtooth” graph of window size with time, which oscillates (more or less) around the “optimal” window size. For an idealized sawtooth graph, see 19.1.1 The Somewhat-Steady State ; for some “real” (simulation-created) sawtooth graphs see 31.4.1 Some TCP Reno cwnd graphs .
While this window-size-optimization strategy has its roots in attempting to maximize the available bandwidth, it also has the effect of greatly limiting the number of packet-loss events. As a result, TCP has come to be the Internet protocol charged with reducing (or at least managing) congestion on the Internet, and – relatedly – with ensuring fairness of bandwidth allocations to competing connections. Core Internet routers – at least in the classical case – essentially have no role in enforcing congestion or fairness restrictions at all. The Internet, in other words, places responsibility for congestion avoidance cooperatively into the hands of end users. While “cheating” is possible, this cooperative approach has worked remarkably well.
While TCP is ubiquitous, the real-time performance of TCP is not always consistent: if a packet is lost, the receiving TCP host will not turn over anything further to the receiving application until the lost packet has been retransmitted successfully; this is often called head-of-line blocking . This is a serious problem for sound and video applications, which can discreetly handle modest losses but which have much more difficulty with sudden large delays. A few lost packets ideally should mean just a few brief voice dropouts (pretty common on cell phones) or flicker/snow on the video screen (or just reuse of the previous frame); both of these are better than pausing completely.
The basic alternative to TCP is known as UDP , for User Datagram Protocol. UDP, like TCP, provides port numbers to support delivery to multiple endpoints within the receiving host, in effect to a specific process on the host. As with TCP, a UDP socket consists of a ⟨host,port⟩ pair. UDP also includes, like TCP, a checksum over the data. However, UDP omits the other TCP features: there is no connection setup, no lost-packet detection, no automatic timeout/retransmission, and the application must manage its own packetization. This simplicity should not be seen as all negative: the absence of connection setup means data transmission can get started faster, and the absence of lost-packet detection means there is no head-of-line blocking. See 16 UDP Transport .
The Real-time Transport Protocol, or RTP , sits above UDP and adds some additional support for voice and video applications.
The two “classic” traffic patterns for Internet communication are these:
TCP handles both of these well, although its congestion-management features apply only when a large amount of data is in transit at once. Web browsing is something of a hybrid; over time, there is usually considerable burstiness, but individual pages now often exceed 1 MB.
To the above we might add request/reply operations, eg to query a database or to make DNS requests. TCP is widely used here as well, though most DNS traffic still uses UDP. There are periodic calls for a new protocol specifically addressing this pattern, though at this point the use of TCP is well established. If a sequence of request/reply operations is envisioned, a single TCP connection makes excellent sense, as the connection-setup overhead is minimal by comparison. See also 16.5 Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and 18.15.2 SCTP .
This century has seen an explosion in streaming video ( 25.3.2 Streaming Video ), in lengths from a few minutes to a few hours. Streaming radio stations might be left playing indefinitely. TCP generally works well here, assuming the receiver can get, say, a minute ahead, buffering the video that has been received but not yet viewed. That way, if there is a dip in throughput due to congestion, the receiver has time to recover. Buffering works a little less well for streaming radio, as the listener doesn’t want to get too far behind, though ten seconds is reasonable. Fortunately, audio bandwidth is smaller.
Another issue with streaming video is the bandwidth demand. Most streaming-video services attempt to estimate the available throughput, and then adapt to that throughput by changing the video resolution ( 25.3 Real-time Traffic ).
Typically, video streaming operates on a start/stop basis: the sender pauses when the receiver’s playback buffer is “full”, and resumes when the playback buffer drops below a certain threshold.
If the video (or, for that matter, voice audio) is interactive , there is much less opportunity for stream buffering. If someone asks a simple question on an Internet telephone call, they generally want an answer more or less immediately; they do not expect to wait for the answer to make it through the other party’s stream buffer. 200 ms of buffering is noticeable. Here we enter the realm of genuine real-time traffic ( 25.3 Real-time Traffic ). UDP is often used to avoid head-of-line blocking. Lower bandwidth helps; voice-grade communications traditionally need only 8 kB/sec, less if compression is used. On the other hand, there may be constraints on the variation in delivery time (known as jitter ; see 25.11.3 RTP Control Protocol for a specific numeric interpretation). Interactive video, with its much higher bandwidth requirements, is more difficult; fortunately, users seem to tolerate the common pauses and freezes.
Within the Transport layer, essentially all network connections involve a client and a server . Often this pattern is repeated at the Application layer as well: the client contacts the server and initiates a login session, or browses some web pages, or watches a movie. Sometimes, however, Application-layer exchanges fit the peer-to-peer model better, in which the two endpoints are more-or-less co-equals. Some examples include
RFC 5694 contains additional discussion of peer-to-peer patterns.
Sites with an extremely large volume of content to distribute often turn to a specialized communication pattern called a content-distribution network or CDN . To reduce the amount of long-distance traffic, or to reduce the round-trip time, a site replicates its content at multiple datacenters (also called Points of Presence (PoPs), nodes , access points or edge servers ). When a user makes a request ( eg for a web page or a video), the request is routed to the nearest (or approximately nearest) datacenter, and the content is delivered from there.
CDN Mapping
For a geographical map of the servers in the NetFlix CDN as of 2016, see [BCTCU16] . The map was created solely through end-user measurements. Most of the servers are in North and South America and Europe.
Large web pages typically contain both static content and also individualized dynamic content. On a typical Facebook page, for example, the videos and javascript might be considered static, while the individual wall posts might be considered dynamic. The CDN may cache all or most of the static content at each of its edge servers, leaving the dynamic content to come from a centralized server. Alternatively, the dynamic content may be replicated at each CDN edge node as well, though this introduces some real-time coordination issues.
If dynamic content is not replicated, the CDN may include private high-speed links between its nodes, allowing for rapid low-congestion delivery to any node. Alternatively, CDN nodes may simply communicate using the public Internet. Finally, the CDN may (or may not) be configured to support fast interactive traffic between nodes, eg teleconferencing traffic, as is outlined in 25.6.1 A CDN Alternative to IntServ .
Organizations can create their own CDNs, but often turn to specialized CDN providers, who often combine their CDN services with website-hosting services.
In principle, all that is needed to create a CDN is a multiplicity of datacenters, each with its own connection to the Internet; private links between datacenters are also common. In practice, many CDN providers also try to build direct connections with the ISPs that serve their customers; the Google Edge Network above does this. This can improve performance and reduce traffic costs; we will return to this in 15.7.1 MED values and traffic engineering .
Finding the edge server that is closest to a given user is a tricky issue. There are three techniques in common use. In the first, the edge servers are all given different IP addresses, and DNS is configured to have users receive the IP address of the closest edge server, 10.1 DNS . In the second, each edge server has the same IP address, and anycast routing is used to route traffic from the user to the closest edge server, 15.8 BGP and Anycast . Finally, for HTTP applications a centralized server can look up the approximate location of the user, and then redirect the web page to the closest edge server.
One problem with having a program on your machine listening on an open TCP port is that someone may connect and then, using some flaw in the software on your end, do something malicious to your machine. Damage can range from the unintended downloading of personal data to compromise and takeover of your entire machine, making it a distributor of viruses and worms or a steppingstone in later break-ins of other machines.
A strategy known as buffer overflow ( 28.2 Stack Buffer Overflow ) has been the basis for a great many total-compromise attacks. The idea is to identify a point in a server program where it fills a memory buffer with network-supplied data without careful length checking; almost any call to the C library function gets(buf) will suffice. The attacker then crafts an oversized input string which, when read by the server and stored in memory, overflows the buffer and overwrites subsequent portions of memory, typically containing the stack-frame pointers. The usual goal is to arrange things so that when the server reaches the end of the currently executing function, control is returned not to the calling function but instead to the attacker’s own payload code located within the string.
A firewall is a mechanism to block connections deemed potentially risky, eg those originating from outside the site. Generally ordinary workstations do not ever need to accept connections from the Internet; client machines instead initiate connections to (better-protected) servers. So blocking incoming connections works reasonably well; when necessary ( eg for games) certain ports can be selectively unblocked.
The original firewalls were built into routers. Incoming traffic to servers was often blocked unless it was sent to one of a modest number of “open” ports; for non-servers, typically all inbound connections were blocked. This allowed internal machines to operate reasonably safely, though being unable to accept incoming connections is sometimes inconvenient.
Nowadays per-host firewalls – in addition to router-based firewalls – are common: you can configure your workstation not to accept inbound connections to most (or all) ports regardless of whether software on the workstation requests such a connection. Outbound connections can, in many cases, also be prevented.
The typical home router implements something called network-address translation ( 9.7 Network Address Translation ), which, in addition to conserving IPv4 addresses, also provides firewall protection.
There exists a great variety of useful programs for probing and diagnosing networks. Here we list a few of the simpler, more common and available ones; some of these are addressed in more detail in subsequent chapters. Some of these, like ping , are generally present by default; others will have to be installed from somewhere.
Ping is useful to determine if another machine is accessible, eg
See 10.4 Internet Control Message Protocol for how it works. Sometimes ping fails because the necessary packets are blocked by a firewall.
ifconfig , ipconfig , ip
To find your own IP address you can use ipconfig on Windows, ifconfig on Linux and Macintosh systems, or the newer ip addr list on Linux. The output generally lists all active interfaces but can be restricted to selected interfaces if desired. The ip command in particular can do many other things as well. The Windows command netsh interface ip show config also provides IP addresses.
nslookup , dig and host
This trio of programs, all developed by the Internet Systems Consortium , are all used for DNS lookups. They differ in convenience and options. The oldest is nslookup , the one with the most options (by a rather wide margin) is dig , and the newest and arguably most convenient for normal usage is host .
See 10.1.2 nslookup and dig .
This lists the route from you to a remote host:
The last router (and intronetworks.cs.luc.edu itself) don’t respond to the traceroute packets, so the list is not quite complete. The Windows tracert utility is functionally equivalent. See 10.4.1 Traceroute and Time Exceeded for further information.
Traceroute sends, by default, three probes for each router. Sometimes the responses do not all come back from the same router, as happened above at routers 4, 6, 7, 9 and 10. Router 9 sent back three distinct responses.
On Linux systems the mtr command may be available as an alternative to traceroute; it repeats the traceroute at one-second intervals and generates cumulative statistics.
route and netstat
The commands route , route print (Windows), ip route show (Linux), and netstat -r (all systems) display the host’s local IP forwarding table. For workstations not acting as routers, this includes the route to the default router and, usually, not much else. The default route is sometimes listed as destination 0.0.0.0 with netmask 0.0.0.0 (equivalent to 0.0.0.0/0).
The command netstat -a shows the existing TCP connections and open UDP sockets.
The netcat program, often called nc , allows the user to create TCP or UDP connections and send lines of text back and forth. It is seldom included by default. See 16.1.4 netcat and 17.7.1 netcat again .
This is a convenient combination of packet capture and packet analysis, from wireshark.org . See 17.4 TCP and WireShark and 12.4 Using IPv6 and IPv4 Together for examples.
WireShark was originally named Etherreal. An earlier command-line-only packet-capture program is tcpdump , though WireShark has greatly expanded support for packet-format decoding. Both WireShark and tcpdump support both live packet capture and reading from .pcap (packet capture) and .pcapng (next generation) files.
WireShark is the only non-command-line program listed here. It is sometimes desired to monitor packets on a remote system. If X-windows is involved ( eg on Linux), this can be done by logging in from one’s local system using ssh -X , which enables X-windows forwarding, and then starting wireshark (or perhaps sudo wireshark ) from the command line. Other alternatives include tcpdump and tshark ; the latter is part of the WireShark distribution and supports the same packet-decoding facilities as WireShark. Finally, there is termshark , a frontend for tshark that offers a terminal-based interface reasonably similar to WireShark’s graphical interface.
The Internet protocols discussed above are defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force , or IETF (under the aegis of the Internet Architecture Board , or IAB, in turn under the aegis of the Internet Society , ISOC). The IETF publishes “Request For Comment” or RFC documents that contain all the formal Internet standards; these are available at http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html (note that, by the time a document appears here, the actual comment-requesting period is generally long since closed). The five-layer model is closely associated with the IETF, though is not an official standard.
RFC standards sometimes allow modest flexibility. With this in mind, RFC 2119 declares official understandings for the words MUST and SHOULD. A feature labeled with MUST is “an absolute requirement for the specification”, while the term SHOULD is used when
there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
The original ARPANET network was developed by the US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA; it went online in 1969. The National Science Foundation began NSFNet in 1986; this largely replaced ARPANET. In 1991, operation of the NSFNet backbone was turned over to ANSNet, a private corporation. The ISOC was founded in 1992 as the NSF continued to retreat from the networking business.
Hallmarks of the IETF design approach were David Clark’s declaration
We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.
and RFC Editor Jon Postel ’s Robustness Principle, here stated in its RFC 761 / RFC 793 form:
TCP implementations should follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
Postel’s aphorism is often shortened to “be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send”. As such, it has come in for occasional criticism in recent years with regard to cryptographic protocols, for which lax enforcement can lead to security vulnerabilities. To be fair, however, Postel wrote this in an era when protocol specifications sometimes failed to fully spell out the rules for every possible situation, and too-strict implementations sometimes failed to interoperate. Just what should happen if a TCP packet arrives with the SYN bit set, for creating a new connection, and also the FIN bit, for terminating that connection? However, TCP specifications today are generally much more complete, and cryptographic protocols even moreso. One way to read Postel’s rule is that protocol implementations should be as strict as necessary, but no stricter .
There is a persistent – though false – notion that the distributed-routing architecture of IP was due to a US Department of Defense mandate that the original ARPAnet be built to survive a nuclear attack. In fact, the developers of IP seemed unconcerned with this. However, Paul Baran did write, in his 1962 paper outlining the concept of packet switching, that
If [the number of stations] is made sufficiently large, it can be shown that highly survivable system structures can be built – even in the thermonuclear era.
In 1977 the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO , founded the Open Systems Interconnection project, or OSI , a process for creation of new network standards. OSI represented an attempt at the creation of networking standards independent of any individual government.
The OSI project is today perhaps best known for its seven-layer networking model: between Transport and Application were inserted the Session and Presentation layers. The Session layer was to handle “sessions” between applications (including the graceful closing of Transport-layer connections, something included in TCP, and the re-establishment of “broken” Transport-layer connections, which TCP could sorely use), and the Presentation layer was to handle things like defining universal data formats ( eg for binary numeric data, or for non-ASCII character sets), and eventually came to include compression and encryption as well.
Data presentation and session management are important concepts, but in many cases it has not proved necessary, or even particularly useful, to make them into true layers. The layer approach has been very helpful in organizing networking software into separate sections, but is hard to define precisely. One approach is to declare that a layer should communicate directly only with the layers immediately above and below it. The application passes its data to the Transport layer to receive the Transport header, which passes the data to the IP layer to receive the IP header, and on to the LAN layer. Each layer can be seen as an encapsulated software object, or module, by the layer above, and each layer in turn encapsulates the packet from its parent layer by adding a new header. This is mostly true for the Transport, IP and LAN layers, but there are irregularities: the transport-layer checksum, for example, needs information from the IP layer, and may in fact end up being calculated at the LAN layer ( 16.1.3.2 UDP and IP addresses and 17.5 TCP Offloading ).
Even allowing for these kinds of irregularities, however, it is hard to justify full-fledged layer status for the Session and Presentation actions. What often happens is that the Application layer manages its own Transport connections, and is responsible for reading and writing data directly from and to the Transport layer. The application then uses conventional libraries for Presentation actions such as encryption, compression and format translation, and for Session actions such as handling broken Transport connections and multiplexing streams of data over a single Transport connection. Version 2 of the HTTP protocol, for example, contains a subprotocol for managing multiple streams; this is generally regarded as part of the Application layer, if for no other reason than that it is not available to any other application.
An opposing view is that it is possible to view the SSL/TLS transport-encryption service, 29.5.2 TLS , as an example of a true Presentation layer. Applications generally read and write data directly to the SSL/TLS endpoint, which in turn mostly encapsulates (as a software module) the underlying TCP connection. The encapsulation is incomplete, though, in that SSL/TLS applications generally are responsible for creating their own Transport-layer (TCP) connections; see 29.5.3 A TLS Programming Example and the note at the end of 29.5.3.2 TLSserver . In the end, while the seven-layer model is reasonably popular, from a software-architecture standpoint those two extra layers aren’t really in the same league as those of the five-layer model.
OSI has its own version of IP and TCP. The IP equivalent is CLNP , the ConnectionLess Network Protocol, although OSI also defines a connection- oriented protocol CMNS. The TCP equivalent is TP4; OSI also defines TP0 through TP3 but those are for connection-oriented networks.
It seems clear that the primary reasons the OSI protocols failed in the marketplace were their ponderous bureaucracy for protocol management, their principle that protocols be completed before implementation began, and their insistence on rigid adherence to the specifications to the point of non-interoperability; indeed, Postel’s aphorism above may have been intended as a response to this last point. In contrast, the IETF had (and still has) a “two working implementations” rule for a protocol to become a “Draft Standard”. From RFC 2026 :
This rule has often facilitated the discovery of protocol design weaknesses early enough that the problems could be fixed. The OSI approach is a striking failure for the “waterfall” design model, when competing with the IETF’s cyclic “prototyping” model. However, it is worth noting that the IETF has similarly been unable to keep up with rapid changes in html, particularly at the browser end; the OSI mistakes were mostly evident only in retrospect.
Trying to fit protocols into specific layers is often both futile and irrelevant. By one perspective, the Real-Time Protocol RTP lives at the Transport layer, but just above the UDP layer; others have put RTP into the Application layer. Parts of the RTP protocol resemble the Session and Presentation layers. A key component of the IP protocol is the set of various router-update protocols; some of these freely use higher-level layers. Similarly, tunneling might be considered to be a Link-layer protocol, but tunnels are often created and maintained at the Application layer.
A sometimes-more-successful approach to understanding “layers” is to view them instead as parts of a protocol graph . Thus, in the following diagram we have two protocol sublayers within the transport layer (UDP and RTP), and one protocol (ARP) not easily assigned to a layer.
Fig. 7: A protocol graph
Note the thin “wasp” waist at the IP layer: there are many protocols above and below, but only one protocol at the IP layer. This universality of the IP layer has been one of the things contributing to IP’s success.
Though not officially tied to the IETF, the Berkeley Unix releases became de facto reference implementations for most of the TCP/IP protocols. 4.1BSD (BSD for Berkeley Software Distribution) was released in 1981, 4.2BSD in 1983, 4.3BSD in 1986, 4.3BSD-Tahoe in 1988, 4.3BSD-Reno in 1990, and 4.4BSD in 1994. Descendants today include FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. The TCP implementations TCP Tahoe and TCP Reno ( 19 TCP Reno and Congestion Management ) took their names from the corresponding 4.3BSD releases.
This completes our tour of the basics. In the remaining chapters we will expand on the material here.
Exercises may be given fractional (floating point) numbers, to allow for interpolation of new exercises. Exercises marked with a ♢ have solutions or hints at 34.1 Solutions for An Overview of Networks .
1.0. Give forwarding tables for each of the switches S1-S4 in the following network with destinations A, B, C, D. For the next_hop column, give the neighbor on the appropriate link rather than the interface number.
2.0. Give forwarding tables for each of the switches S1-S4 in the following network with destinations A, B, C, D. Again, use the neighbor form of next_hop rather than the interface form. Try to keep the route to each destination as short as possible. What decision has to be made in this exercise that did not arise in the preceding exercise?
3.0. In the network of the previous exercise, suppose that destinations directly connected to an immediate neighbor are always reached via that neighbor; eg S1’s forwarding table will always include ⟨B,S2⟩ and ⟨D,S4⟩. This leaves only routes to the diagonally opposite nodes undetermined ( eg S1 to C). Show that, no matter which next_hop entries are chosen for the diagonally opposite destinations, no routing loops can ever be formed. (Hint: the number of links to any diagonally opposite switch is always 2.)
4.0.♢ Give forwarding tables for each of the switches A-E in the following network. Destinations are A-E themselves. Keep all route lengths the minimum possible (one hop for an immediate neighbor, two hops for everything else). If a destination is an immediate neighbor, you may list its next_hop as direct or local for simplicity. Indicate destinations for which there is more than one choice for next_hop.
5.0. Consider the following arrangement of switches and destinations. Give forwarding tables (in neighbor form) for S1-S4 that include default forwarding entries; the default entries should point toward S5 . The default entries will thus automatically forward to the “possible other destinations” shown below right.
Eliminate all table entries that are implied by the default entry (that is, if the default entry is to S3, eliminate all other entries for which the next hop is S3).
6.0. Four switches are arranged as below. The destinations are S1 through S4 themselves.
7.0. Suppose we have switches S1 through S4; the forwarding-table destinations are the switches themselves. The tables for S2 and S3 are as below, where the next_hop value is specified in neighbor form:
S2: ⟨S1,S1⟩ ⟨S3,S3⟩ ⟨S4,S3⟩ S3: ⟨S1,S2⟩ ⟨S2,S2⟩ ⟨S4,S4⟩
From the above we can conclude that S2 must be directly connected to both S1 and S3 as its table lists them as next_hops; similarly, S3 must be directly connected to S2 and S4.
S3: ⟨S1,S4⟩ ⟨S2,S2⟩ ⟨S4,S4⟩
While the table for S4 is not given, you may assume that forwarding does work correctly. However, you should not assume that paths are the shortest possible. Hint: It follows from the S3 table above that the path from S3 to S1 starts S3 ⟶ S4; how will this path continue? The next switch along the path cannot be S1, because of the hypothesis that S1 and S4 are not directly connected.
8.0. (a) Suppose a network is as follows, with the only path from A to C passing through B:
Explain why a single routing loop cannot include both A and C. Hint: if the loop involves destination D, how does B forward to D?
(b). Suppose a routing loop follows the path A──S 1 ──S 2 ── … ──S n ──A, where none of the S i are equal to A. Show that all the S i must be distinct. (A corollary of this is that any routing loop created by datagram-forwarding either involves forwarding back and forth between a pair of adjacent switches, or else involves an actual graph cycle in the network topology; linear loops of length greater than 1 are impossible.)
9.0. Consider the following arrangement of switches:
Suppose S1-S6 have the forwarding tables below. For each of the following destinations, suppose a packet is sent to the destination from S1 .
Give the switches the packet will pass through, including the initial switch S1, up until the final switch S10-S12.
S1: (A,S4), (B,S2), (C,S4), (D,S2), (E,S2), (F,S4) S2: (A,S5), (B,S5), (D,S5), (E,S3), (F,S3) S3: (B,S6), (C,S2), (E,S6), (F,S6) S4: (A,S10), (C,S5), (E,S10), (F,S5) S5: (A,S6), (B,S11), (C,S6), (D,S6), (E,S4), (F,S2) S6: (A,S3), (B,S12), (C,S12), (D,S12), (E,S5), (F,S12)
10.0. Suppose a set of nodes A-F and switches S1-S6 are connected as shown.
The links between switches are labeled with weights , which are used by some routing applications. The weights represent the cost of using that link. You are to find the path through S1-S6 with lowest total cost (that is, with smallest sum of weights), for each of the following transmissions. For example, the lowest-cost path from A to E is A–S1–S2–S5–E, for a total cost of 1+2=3; the alternative path A–S1–S4–S5–E has total cost 5+1=6.
(d). Give the complete forwarding table for S 2 , where all routes are selected for lowest total cost.
11.0. In exercise 7.0, the routes taken by packets A-D are reasonably direct, but the routes for E and F are rather circuitous.
Hint: you can do this by assigning a weight of 1 to all links except to one or two “bad” links; the “bad” links get a weight of 10. In each of (a) and (b) above, the route taken will be the route that avoids all the “bad” links. You must treat (a) entirely differently from (b); there is no assignment of weights that can account for both routes.
12.0. Suppose we have the following three Class C IP networks, joined by routers R1–R4. There is no connection to the outside Internet. Give the forwarding table for each router. For networks directly connected to a router ( eg 200.0.1/24 and R1), include the network in the table but list the next hop as direct or local .
A computer network is a network of diverse computing hardware linked through different communication technologies to share various resources . The communication links of the network can be either wired (cables) or wireless (radio waves / IR signals).
This page shows you useful information on Computer Network Research Topics, Projects with Source Code, Research Areas, Project Topics, and Tools!!!
Moreover, the network can be differentiated in the characteristics of constrained resources, network structure, requests history/demand, communication technologies , and more. However, it is flexible to share resources, and it has some technical challenges in real-time development. Here, we have given you the common services that we offer for overcoming network issues.
The layering approach in networking is used to divide the message into various chunks . Basically, there are seven layers in the networking process where each layer has unique responsibilities. All these layers co-operatively work together to transfer the message from one end to another (i.e., source to destination ). Now, we can see the available layers and their function in sequential order.
With an aim to support wireless communications, numerous different technologies have been launched. Before selecting this technology, one should undergo deep study on which is more suitable for their computer network projects . Our research team will help you in both business/individual if you need the best guidance over that selection of innovative computer network research topics . Usually, we recommend the technology based on the requirement of your selected networking projects for final year students . For your information, here we have given you a few lists of communication technologies,
In recent days, you can witness the gradual growth of computer networks in networking industries through many new developments. It includes so many technologies to portrait the actual networking industry’s performance. Here, we have given you some new networking technologies that are expected to master the next networking industries. .
For illustrative purpose, Digital Communication work in accordance with enabling communication technologies, modulation, signal processing projects, channel modeling, and error control . Similarly, Network Communications Protocols take an in-charge of routing, resource allocation, data distribution, and medium access control.
Both technologies/areas have high capabilities in a different dimension of the networking process. And they are network designing, model construction, networking testing on testbeds, experimental analysis, and performance assessments. Our researchers have given you the currently ongoing of innovative computer network research topics mentioned below for your reference.
Basically, networking is a widespread process where network construction and deployment in the real world is a challenging job. So, the entire process is fragmented into different tasks where they are performed by a set of skilled networking engineers as follows,
For research purposes, we can simulate the original network behavior and performance inappropriate simulation tools. Most importantly, it reduces the cost of real-time implementation and deployment.
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Now, we can see the performance measurement of the networking model. Through the sophisticated simulation tool / experimental testbeds , we can develop any kind of network scenario. Once the model is processed, then the efficiency of the model is verified by several metrics. Here, we have given you the metrics along with different modelling techniques .
Simulate the network model based on the code of the software application . Through code, we can instruct the model to perform our project requirements. At the end of the simulation, it yields the overall performance and behaviour of the network in different dimensions and metrics. Further, it also measures the communication between the network entities.
The source code of software has the main responsibility to create strong basements for designing and simulating the network model . Through the code only, the developers can make the smart work to tackle the problem in a simplified way. Effective code work is also a part of the contribution in research.
Since your code can help for learning or reusability (other application development), for your clarity, our developers will explain the implementation of research methodologies while delivering Computer Networks Projects with Source Code . Below, we have given you the different simulations of real-time network models,
So far, we have discussed computer networks, network layers, communication technologies, current research areas, computer network research topics, project simulation, and performance estimation . Now, our development team has a list of widely used network simulator tools.
Network simulators let the users modify the simulator operations for their project needs. Then the users can analyze the system performance and entity behavior under different circumstances. Further, it supports communication standards/protocols like TCP, WLAN, CR, Wi-Max, WSN , and many more. Here, we have given you the list of a few best result yielding simulators which is more apt for computer network simulations,
For instance, NS3 (network Simulator 3) is detailed here.
NS3 is one of the best simulation tools to design and simulate networking projects . With the help of this tool, we can virtually design different nodes through Helper classes. By the by, it enables the installation of internet stacks, applications, devices, and many more. Further, we can insert parameters in the channel for performance evaluation in implementing computer network research topics . And let them produce traffic at runtime and pass the packets from source to destination through the selected route path. The other special features are given as follows,
To sum up, we have sufficient technical professionals to support you in all the latest research areas of computer networks . In addition, our developments also give you the best assistance in project development from tool selection to result in an assessment. So, if you need our reliable service computer network research topics, projects with source code then communicate our team.
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Before sit down to research proposal writing, we need to decide exact journals. For e.g. SCI, SCI-E, ISI, SCOPUS.
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Discover the world's research
50+ Computer Science Research Topic Ideas To Fast-Track Your Project
Finding and choosing a strong research topic is the critical first step when it comes to crafting a high-quality dissertation, thesis or research project. If you’ve landed on this post, chances are you’re looking for a computer science-related research topic , but aren’t sure where to start. Here, we’ll explore a variety of CompSci & IT-related research ideas and topic thought-starters, including algorithms, AI, networking, database systems, UX, information security and software engineering.
NB – This is just the start…
The topic ideation and evaluation process has multiple steps . In this post, we’ll kickstart the process by sharing some research topic ideas within the CompSci domain. This is the starting point, but to develop a well-defined research topic, you’ll need to identify a clear and convincing research gap , along with a well-justified plan of action to fill that gap.
If you’re new to the oftentimes perplexing world of research, or if this is your first time undertaking a formal academic research project, be sure to check out our free dissertation mini-course. In it, we cover the process of writing a dissertation or thesis from start to end. Be sure to also sign up for our free webinar that explores how to find a high-quality research topic.
While the ideas we’ve presented above are a decent starting point for finding a CompSci-related research topic, they are fairly generic and non-specific. So, it helps to look at actual dissertations and theses to see how this all comes together.
Below, we’ve included a selection of research projects from various CompSci-related degree programs to help refine your thinking. These are actual dissertations and theses, written as part of Master’s and PhD-level programs, so they can provide some useful insight as to what a research topic looks like in practice.
Looking at these titles, you can probably pick up that the research topics here are quite specific and narrowly-focused , compared to the generic ones presented earlier. This is an important thing to keep in mind as you develop your own research topic. That is to say, to create a top-notch research topic, you must be precise and target a specific context with specific variables of interest . In other words, you need to identify a clear, well-justified research gap.
If you’re still feeling a bit unsure about how to find a research topic for your Computer Science dissertation or research project, check out our Topic Kickstarter service.
Investigating the impacts of software refactoring techniques and tools in blockchain-based developments.
Steps on getting this project topic
I want to work with this topic, am requesting materials to guide.
Information Technology -MSc program
It’s really interesting but how can I have access to the materials to guide me through my work?
That’s my problem also.
Investigating the impacts of software refactoring techniques and tools in blockchain-based developments is in my favour. May i get the proper material about that ?
BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY
I NEED TOPIC
Database Management Systems
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2019, IJSTE - International Journal of Science Technology & Engineering
Computer networks are a system of interconnected computers for the purpose of sharing digital information. The concept of a network began in 1962 when a server at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was connected to a server in Santa Monica, California. Since that time the proliferation of computers and computer networks has increased significantly. One of the most significant challenges to networks is attacks on their resources caused by inadequate network security. In this research paper we highlight and overview concept of computer networks. Computer networks have become increasingly ubiquitous. In today's world, a computer network is much more than a collection of interconnected devices. Computer networks are a system of interconnected computers for the purpose of sharing digital information. The computer network enables to analyze, organize and disseminate the information that is essential to profitability. The rise of intranets and internets is the important aspect of computer networking. Intranets and internets are private business networks that are based on internet technology. The businesses are currently implementing intranets at a breakneck pace and for one reason only, an intranet enables a business to collect, manage and disseminate information more quickly and easily than ever before. Many businesses are implementing intranets simply to remain competitive; business that delay is likely to see their competition outdistance them. In this article we are presenting the basic concepts of networking.
FEMI ARAMIDE
The paper examines in detail the concepts of computer network, security and auditing of computer network. In effect, the paper highlights the difference, historical antecedents and the different types of networks as well as their classifications. The paper also examined major properties of a good network in terms of scope and typology. The paper concludes that for effective functioning a regular appraisal of performance auditing as well as good security for the network must be ensured.
Sayed Ashraf Husaini Kazi
IOSR Journals
In recent days, the wide use of computer networks has been marked its sign to the modern civilization. Almost in all the organizations, various types of computer networks, namely, LAN, MAN, WAN, PAN, CAN, SAN etc. are used. While using a computer network, the main factors, which arise are, 1. Construction of the network, 2. Type of the network, 3. Good features of the network for smooth computing, and 4. Security of the network. In this theoretical paper, a different concept, " Private Area Network " is designed which should be implemented in the university or college campuses for cost effective, smooth and secured routing. This paper is basically a combinational implementation of " Cisco EIGRP " , " ACL mechanism " and a different " CAN (Campus Area Network) " with Networking Security Concept. In this system, the higher authority can directly contact to the desired department with secured and hassle-free computing. The network should be implemented with the help of construction plans mentioned in this paper. Protocols must be maintained according to the guidelines and then the security concept will prevent the network from various attacks.
Sagar Rajpal
With the advancement of technology and growth in the wireless industry over time, there seems to be a major change every few years and the recent advancement is Wi-Fi 802.11ac. People are more inclined to use the wireless network within the organisations, campuses and offices. The recent advancement is the fifth generation of Wi-Fi (802.11ac) which has extended the benefits of the previous Wi-Fi (802.11n) with increase in data rate, channel bandwidth, and is more scalable and also the operating frequency. The organisations which started in the late 2012 and early 2013 have a very good chance of deploying these new technologies without any overhead cost or just a minimum amount when compared to other organisations. The brief overview of computer networks has been given in chapter-1 along with the OSI model, network types and topologies. The chapter-2 will discuss the wireless network in detail and their standards. As every network requires security for its proper functioning, it also has to maintain the network availability. The security concerns and types of DoS attacks that can affect the network along with some strategies of prevent such attacks have been discussed in chapter-3. Chapter-4 will briefly illustrate the types of network simulators which are used to simulate a network. The main aim of the project is simulate a wireless network for a small and a medium sized office network and to find the denial of service point which is illustrated in the Chapters-5 and 6 show the simulation of the wireless network with mobile stations and server and wireless network with fixed workstations and server respectively.
eSAT Journals
This paper grabs the detail study on information about Computer Networking. Two distinct electronic media communicating between themselves and forming a group within its area can be termed as Computer Networking. In the modern globe, communication is the most essential part of living creatures and the need of communication, from one end of the world to the other end, gave rise to the system of Networking. There are various types of forming of the network. Networking and its different types and uses will be studied throughout the paper. Further part of the paper will deal in detail on the topic of networking devices that forms the base of a successful network. We propose a methodology to use human body as a transmitting medium to pass data in a Human Area Network (HAN).
moses Aggor
IJHES Indonesia
Chief E D I T O R IJRISAT
This paper describes about the computing environment and types of network used and various others existed possible networks available for certain purpose and can be used in the computer network environment. As everyone knows about the computer network, basically it is a collection of computer machine, servers, network devices, mainframes or any devices which has the capacity or features of connecting to each other and can form a network. Minimum two machines or device can be connected and can be said as a computer network. Now this network is capable to share information or data within the connected devices or networks only. Its best suited example can be internet where many more than the million peoples are confined within the networks and exchange data or information worldwide in fractions of seconds on a single click of computer keyboard. Often we see and use widely in the applications of cloud computing and cyber crimes and security concern.
Yahya Yaqobi
abdullah alrashdan
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IJSTE - International Journal of Science Technology and Engineering
Government Information Quarterly
Marvin Sirbu
Huseyin Polat
George Mavridis
Adewale Ademola
Sri Computer , RAJNISH KUMAR SHUKLA KAFARA
Aroso Emmanuel Adedeji
Aroso A . Emmanuel
Latest Research Topics in Networking offer newfangled project topics for our students from bachelors and master degree (B.E/M.E/M.Phil/M.Tech/MCA) in the field of networking. Networking is the biggest and fastest emerging area, making it hinder students with new research into networking technologies. However, students spend more money on their networking projects. To help our students, we also offer the latest networking projects at optimum cost as far as we also provided 5000+ projects from 120+ countries students from all over the world.
We develop projects both in software and hardware, and in software, we use both open source and proprietary software. We also suggest our students always choose the latest topics because the latest ideas only give something innovative and colorful.
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Latest Research Topics in Networking covers possible list of topics intended also for under graduate and also post graduate students and scholars. In networking, security is one of the major issues in all types of wired and wireless networks, e.g., cloud networking. There is also a lot of research in the networking field because it is also a vast area that prefers among more users.
Generally, networking is defined as the computing devices that exchange information and share ideas among individuals or groups of devices or users using either wired or wireless connection.
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In this post, I am going to talk about the 10 computer networking concepts that every professional should master. I will also include links to the main articles of each concept. So, let’s start with some definitions:
The word “topology” comes from topos, which is Greek for «place». In computer networking , TOPOLOGY is the physical layout of computers, cables, switches, routers, and other components of a network. This term can also refer to the underlying network architecture, such as Ethernet or Token Ring.
When you design a network, your choice of topology will be determined by the size, architecture, cost, and management of the network. Basic network topologies include the following:
To learn more please feel free to read our main article: Network Topology .
LAN stands for Local Area Network and WAN stands for Wide Area Network . A network is any group of computers (servers and workstations) and devices, like smartphones and printers, that are connected together and able to communicate with each other.
So, LAN is the local network, network devices connected together within the same geographic location. A WAN connects LANs to each other, usually across multiple locations as well as individual devices that connect from a remote distance.
A WAN may be limited to an enterprise (a corporation or an organization) or accessible to the public. The internet is an example of a worldwide public WAN.
OSI Model is a short name for the Open Systems Interconnection reference model for networking.
This theoretical model explains how networks behave within an orderly, seven-layered model for networked communication. The OSI model isn’t specific to a protocol suite and can be applied to most networking protocols past and present.
To learn more about this concept read the main article: OSI model .
Network equipment includes a broad range of devices which can be classified as core network components that interconnect other network components, hybrid components which can be found in the core or border of a network, and hardware or software components that typically sit on the connection point of different networks.
The Network Switch allows each connected device to talk to the others.
Router and Switch are both network connecting devices. A router works at the network layer and is responsible to find the shortest path for a packet whereas a Switch connects various devices in a network. A router connects devices across multiple networks. Switch’s main objective is to connect various devices in a network.
Network Cabling is the medium through which information usually moves from one network device to another. There are several types of cable which are commonly used with LANs.
There are two basic types of cabling used in LAN networking environments:
Read the main article about network cabling .
Wireless networking is a wireless computer network that links two or more devices using wireless communication to form a local area network ( LAN ) within a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, campus, or office building.
The IEEE 802.11 has two basic modes of operation: infrastructure and ad hoc mode. In ad hoc mode, mobile units transmit directly peer-to-peer. In infrastructure mode, mobile units communicate through a wireless access point (WAP) that serves as a bridge to other networks (such as the Internet or a local area network).
Communications protocols are a set of rules required to exchange information between computing systems. Like any spoken language, these protocols allow computers to understand each other.
These protocols define the rules, syntax, semantics, and synchronization of communication and possible error recovery methods.
Most common communication protocols:
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol ( DHCP ) is a client/server protocol that automatically provides an Internet Protocol (IP) host with its IP address and other related configuration information such as the subnet mask and default gateway. DHCP allows hosts to obtain required TCP/IP configuration information from a DHCP server.
In short, DNS is a global database system that relates IP addresses with an easy-to-remember name. For computers to communicate, it is essential that each network component has one unique identifier (IP address). But when a human needs to identify a specific network component, it is very difficult to remember something like 101.87.23.122. So, there is a global system called DNS that allows giving a specific name (with some rules attached) to an IP address.
The last of this list of computer networking concepts is Network security.
Network security is the protection of the underlying networking infrastructure from unauthorized access, misuse, or theft. It involves creating a secure infrastructure for devices, applications, users, and applications to work in a secure manner. See, as examples, the articles about implementing a firewall and what is a VPN .
Just resuming, here are 10 of the most important computer networking concepts:
A computer network is a collection of computers or devices connected to share resources. Any device which can share or receive the data is called a Node. Through which the information or data propagate is known as channels, It can be guided or unguided.
In this Computer network tutorial, you’ll learn basic to advanced concepts like the Basics of computer networks, data link layer, network layer, network security and cryptography, compression techniques, etc.
Mastering computer network concepts is vital for exams like GATE, where networking is a significant portion of the syllabus. To strengthen your understanding and excel in your preparation, consider the GATE CS Self-Paced Course . This course provides comprehensive coverage of networking topics, including detailed tutorials and explanations, helping you build the expertise needed to succeed in your exams.
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Q.1 what are the types of computer network.
PAN(Personal Area Network) : It is the network connecting computer devices for personal use within a range of 10 meters. LAN(Local Area Network) : It is a collection of computers connected to each other in a small area for example school, office, or building. WAN(Wide Area Network) : A Wide Area Network is a large area than the LAN. It is spread across the states or countries. MAN(Metropolitan Area Network) : A Metropolitan area network is the collection of interconnected Local Area Networks.
A link is a connection between two or more computers. Link can be wired or wireless between two nodes. A node is refer to any device in a network like computers, laptops, printers, servers, modems, etc.
Network topology is the physical design of the network, It represents the connectivity between the devices, cables, computers, etc.
There are different types of topology are given below: Bus Topology Star Topology Ring Topology Mesh Topology Tree Topology Hybrid
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A computer network is a group of computers that use a set of common communication protocols over digital interconnections for the purpose of sharing resources located on or provided by the network nodes.
With respect to the Computer Knowledge section in the major Government exams conducted, the Computer Networking forms an extremely important topic and questions are frequently asked from this concept.
In this article, we bring to you the detailed information about the different types of Computer networks, their definition and functions along with the different types of node devices.
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Candidates can also take the reference as to what this concept is all about through the video given below. This will enable candidates to get a more interactive interface to understand the topic and get a better analysis of the concept.
Before moving forward with the article and learning more about the types of computer networks, it is important for candidates to understand what is a network and how it affects the functioning of one or more computers connected with each other.
Definition – A group of computers which are connected to each other and follow similar usage protocols for the purpose of sharing information and having communications provided by the networking nodes is called a Computer Network.
A network may be small where it may include just one system or maybe as large as what one may want. The nodes may further be classified into various types. These include:
Networking can be classified into three types:
We shall discuss all three in detail further below in this article.
There are five main types of Computer Networks:
For a few candidates understanding the different computer networking terms may be a bit tough and the same applies to other computer-related terminology, applications and software. So, to upgrade your Computer Awareness, refer to the difference between articles given below:
Given below are the eight types of Network Topologies:
Discussed below are a few important network devices from the exam point of view:
All the information given above will help candidates prepare themselves for the Computer Knowledge section in the upcoming Government exams and ace it.
It is also important to go through the topic of Computer Networks from the examination point of view. Computer Knowledge is included in the syllabus for all major competitive exams and can be one of the most scoring subjects as the questions asked are very basic and not much complex.
Thus, to assist candidates and help them understand the type of questions which may be asked from this concept, discussed below are a few question and answers based on Computer Network. Candidates can refer to these and start their preparation.
Q 1. Which of the following is not a type of network topology?
Answer: (2) Circle
Q 2. The network device converts digital signals into analog signals and can be connected through a telephone is called _____
Answer: (1) Modem
Q 3. Which of the following terms is related to sending data to a satellite?
Answer: (1) Uplink
Q 4. ______ topology is the simplest topology that connects two nodes directly together with a common link.
Answer: (1) Point to Point
Q 5. Which is the shortest network covering network?
Answer: (4) Personal Area Network (PAN)
Q 6. When two or more topologies connect together, they are called ______
Answer: (3) Hybrid Topology
Q 7. ATM is a form of _____
Answer: (3) Metropolitan Area Network
Q 8. _______ is a small hardware device which joins multiple computers together with a single LAN.
Answer: (2) Switch
Q 9. A collection of various computers into a single coherent system, provided to a client, is called _______.
Answer: (1) Distributed System
Q 10. A network which is constructed by using public wires to connect to a private network is called ______
Answer: (5) Virtual Private Network
All the questions given above are of a similar pattern followed in the competitive exams. Computer Network forms an important part from which questions may be asked in the final exam. Thus, preparing it well is extremely important.
Aspirants can also check the detailed Strategy for Competitive Exam Preparation at the linked article and start their preparation accordingly.
Also, for any further update, candidates can visit BYJU’S and get the latest information, study material and tips to prepare.
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Top 10 Computer Network Project Topics
A computer network is defined as a group of computers that are connected for sharing information from one device to another device . This is mainly based on the communication shared among the networks. In other words, a collection of various devices that can interact with one another for sharing the data . “This article is specially designed for undergraduate, postgraduate students and also Ph.D., Scholars for selecting their innovative Computer Network Project Topics . This page is the first stepping stone of your computer network projects.”
Computer networks contain an enormous amount of tasks for sharing information . The following list insists on some use of computer networks.
In upcoming topics, we see an entire detailed explanation for computer networks . Next, we have to know about the fundamentals of computer networking. Here, we deal with some important terms and models for networks.
Important Terminologies of Computer Networks
These are some fundamentals in computer networks . Without this concept, the construction of a network for communication is impossible. Our experts have well-versed knowledge of the entire concept of computer networks . So, the development of the essential projects is very simple. Then we go through some elements in computer networking .
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Core Elements of Computer Networking
Form the above elements used in the construction of computer networks . If you doing are projects in the Computer network field, these are important to know for your innovative projects. Our experts are always ready for providing the best service for you. With passion, we are offering plenty of admiring project ideas for students and researchers . The upcoming section contains some topics about recent time projects developed and developing by us.
Top 10 Interesting Computer Network Project Topics
These are the project area which is developing in our concern. Do you interested in any other kind of areas in the relevant field. We are giving an idea and explaining projects in-depth manner . Continuously, our experts provide a list of Computer Network Project Topics for your better understanding.
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Future Directions in Computer Networks
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Technology | Ph.D | MS | M.Tech |
---|---|---|---|
NS2 | 75 | 117 | 95 |
NS3 | 98 | 119 | 206 |
OMNET++ | 103 | 95 | 87 |
OPNET | 36 | 64 | 89 |
QULANET | 30 | 76 | 60 |
MININET | 71 | 62 | 74 |
MATLAB | 96 | 185 | 180 |
LTESIM | 38 | 32 | 16 |
COOJA SIMULATOR | 35 | 67 | 28 |
CONTIKI OS | 42 | 36 | 29 |
GNS3 | 35 | 89 | 14 |
NETSIM | 35 | 11 | 21 |
EVE-NG | 4 | 8 | 9 |
TRANS | 9 | 5 | 4 |
PEERSIM | 8 | 8 | 12 |
GLOMOSIM | 6 | 10 | 6 |
RTOOL | 13 | 15 | 8 |
KATHARA SHADOW | 9 | 8 | 9 |
VNX and VNUML | 8 | 7 | 8 |
WISTAR | 9 | 9 | 8 |
CNET | 6 | 8 | 4 |
ESCAPE | 8 | 7 | 9 |
NETMIRAGE | 7 | 11 | 7 |
BOSON NETSIM | 6 | 8 | 9 |
VIRL | 9 | 9 | 8 |
CISCO PACKET TRACER | 7 | 7 | 10 |
SWAN | 9 | 19 | 5 |
JAVASIM | 40 | 68 | 69 |
SSFNET | 7 | 9 | 8 |
TOSSIM | 5 | 7 | 4 |
PSIM | 7 | 8 | 6 |
PETRI NET | 4 | 6 | 4 |
ONESIM | 5 | 10 | 5 |
OPTISYSTEM | 32 | 64 | 24 |
DIVERT | 4 | 9 | 8 |
TINY OS | 19 | 27 | 17 |
TRANS | 7 | 8 | 6 |
OPENPANA | 8 | 9 | 9 |
SECURE CRT | 7 | 8 | 7 |
EXTENDSIM | 6 | 7 | 5 |
CONSELF | 7 | 19 | 6 |
ARENA | 5 | 12 | 9 |
VENSIM | 8 | 10 | 7 |
MARIONNET | 5 | 7 | 9 |
NETKIT | 6 | 8 | 7 |
GEOIP | 9 | 17 | 8 |
REAL | 7 | 5 | 5 |
NEST | 5 | 10 | 9 |
PTOLEMY | 7 | 8 | 4 |
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Computer Networks Term Paper Topics. Term paper topics. Open to non-CS majors only! You may also pick (and are in fact encouraged to pick) your own topic, but you must get the topic approved by me . Current allocation strategies for IP addresses. Say something about the market for IP-address blocks. History and current status of Internet ...
Topic 1: An evaluation of the network security during machine to machine communication in IoT. Research Aim: The research aims to evaluate the network security issues associated with M2M communication in IoT. Objectives: To evaluate the factors affecting the network security of IoT devices. To determine the methods for increasing data integrity ...
This section offers a well-organized and extensive list of 1000 computer science thesis topics, designed to illuminate diverse pathways for academic inquiry and innovation. Whether your interest lies in the emerging trends of artificial intelligence or the practical applications of web development, this assortment spans 25 critical areas of ...
That being the case, this list contains 15 latest research topics in the field of networking. Whether you are a seasoned researcher or just starting, this list can provide you with ample inspiration and guidance to drive your research forward in the dynamic and evolving field of Networking. Explore a curated list of 15 research topics covering ...
This lesson provides a broad overview of the Computer Networking and the Internet. The lesson begins with an overview of the Internet and of networking protocols, introducing several key terms and concepts. We also examine the 'core' of a computer network, examining the links and switches that transport data.
In subject area: Computer Science. Computer networking refers to the process of connecting computers together to enable communication between them. This involves the use of networks, which can be wired or wireless, to transmit data packets between computers. The field of computer networking originated in the 1960s with the development of packet ...
Course Overview. This advanced graduate-level course focuses on the key aspects of modern datacenter networking. Students will explore the differences between traditional Internet architectures and modern datacenters, with an emphasis on cutting-edge technologies, practical applications, and ongoing research.
Trending Thesis Topics in Computer Networking. Reliable Future Technologies of WBAN Security. Enhanced QoS Provisioning and Control. RFID assisted Mobile Devices Identification in WSN. Node Mobility and Spectrum Handoff Management. Controlling of Radio Resources for Improved Packet Access.
Deals with the various aspects and domain of Computer Networks and Communication, Cloud, and Grid Computing | Explore the latest full-text research PDFs, articles, conference papers, preprints and ...
PREREQUISITES: Recommended: CS 340 or equivalent networking course Classes, Textbook, and other readings There will be no textbook for this class. A key part of the class will be to review and discuss networking research papers. Students must read the assigned papers and submit paper reviews before each lecture.
105 Latest Cyber Security Research Topics in 2024
1.1 Layers¶. These three topics - LANs, IP and TCP - are often called layers; they constitute the Link layer, the Internetwork layer, and the Transport layer respectively.Together with the Application layer (the software you use), these form the "four-layer model" for networks.A layer, in this context, corresponds strongly to the idea of a programming interface or library, with the ...
A computer network is a network of diverse computing hardware linked through different communication technologies to share various resources.The communication links of the network can be either wired (cables) or wireless (radio waves / IR signals).. This page shows you useful information on Computer Network Research Topics, Projects with Source Code, Research Areas, Project Topics, and Tools!!!
Computer networks are a. system of i nterconnected computers for the purpose of. sharing digital information. The computer network. enables to analyze, organize and disseminate the. information ...
If you've landed on this post, chances are you're looking for a computer science-related research topic, but aren't sure where to start. Here, we'll explore a variety of CompSci & IT-related research ideas and topic thought-starters, including algorithms, AI, networking, database systems, UX, information security and software ...
Computer networks are a system of interconnected computers for the purpose of sharing digital information. ... Further part of the paper will deal in detail on the topic of networking devices that forms the base of a successful network. ... but smaller than the area covered by a wide area network (WAN). The term is applied to the ...
Network Term Paper Topics - Free download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. network term paper topics
Software defined networking. Network security and also cryptography. Network Function Virtualization. Cognitive computing and also machine learning. Micro services architecture. Adaptive security. Augmented and virtual reality. Cloud networking. Big data analytics in mobile networking.
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OSI 7 layer model. Routers and Switchs (network hardware) Physical transmission medium (cabling) Wireless Networking. Communication protocols (TCP/IP) DHCP. DNS. Network Security (VPN and Firewall) In this post, I'm going to show you 10 computer networking concepts that every professional should master.
Mastering computer network concepts is vital for exams like GATE, where networking is a significant portion of the syllabus. To strengthen your understanding and excel in your preparation, consider the GATE CS Self-Paced Course .This course provides comprehensive coverage of networking topics, including detailed tutorials and explanations, helping you build the expertise needed to succeed in ...
There are five main types of Computer Networks: LAN (Local Area Network) -. Systems connected in a small network like in a building or a small office. It is inexpensive. It uses Ethernet or Token-ring technology. Two or more personal computers can be connected through wires or cables acting as nodes.
The upcoming section contains some topics about recent time projects developed and developing by us. Top 10 Interesting Computer Network Project Topics. Wireless Multimedia Systems. 5G/6G Cellular Systems and Heterogeneous Networks. SDN/NFV and Network Programmability.