Table of Contents
- Page ID
- 40616
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This text is a free and open general-purpose computer-networking textbook, complete with diagrams and exercises.It covers the LAN, internetworking and transport layers, focusing primarily on TCP/IP. Particular attention is paid to congestion; other special topics include queuing, real-time traffic, network management, security and the ns simulator.
1: An Overview of Networks
Local Area Networks, or LANs, are the “physical” networks that provide the connection between machines within, say, a home, school or corporation. LANs are, as the name says, “local”; it is the IP, or Internet Protocol, layer that provides an abstraction for connecting multiple LANs into, well, the Internet. Finally, TCP deals with transport and connections and actually sending user data.2: Ethernet
Current user-level Ethernet today (2013) is usually 100 Mbps, with Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet standard in server rooms and backbones, but because the potential for collisions makes Ethernet speeds scale in odd ways, we will start with the 10 Mbps formulation. While the 10 Mbps speed is obsolete, and while even the Ethernet collision mechanism is largely obsolete, collision management itself continues to play a significant role in wireless networks.3: Other LANs
In the wired era, one could get along quite well with nothing but Ethernet and the occasional long-haul point-to-point link joining different sites. However, there are important alternatives out there. Some, like token ring, are mostly of historical importance; others, like virtual circuits, are of great conceptual importance but – so far – of only modest day-to-day significance. And then there is wireless.4: Links
At the lowest level, network links look like serial lines. In this chapter we address how packet structures are built on top of serial lines, via encoding and framing. Encoding determines how bits and bytes are represented on a serial line; framing allows the receiver to identify the beginnings and endings of packets. We then conclude with the high-speed serial lines offered by the telecommunications industry, T-carrier and SONET, upon which almost all long-haul point-to-point links that tie the5: Packets
In this chapter we address a few abstract questions about packets, and take a close look at transmission times. We also consider how big packets should be, and how to detect transmission errors. These issues are independent of any particular set of protocols.6: Abstract Sliding Windows
In this chapter we take a general look at how to build reliable data-transport layers on top of unreliable lower layers. This is achieved through a retransmit-on-timeout policy; that is, if a packet is transmitted and there is no acknowledgment received during the timeout interval then the packet is resent. As a class, protocols where one side implements retransmit-on-timeout are known as ARQ protocols, for Automatic Repeat reQuest.7: IP version 4
There are multiple LAN protocols below the IP layer and multiple transport protocols above, but IP itself stands alone. The Internet is essentially the IP Internet. If you want to run your own LAN protocol somewhere, or if you want to run your own transport protocol, the Internet backbone will still work just fine for you. But if you want to change the IP layer, you will encounter difficulty. (Just talk to the IPv6 people, or the IP-multicasting or IP-reservations groups.)8: IP version 6
What has been learned from experience with IPv4? First and foremost, more than 32 bits are needed for addresses; the primary motive in developing IPv6 was the specter of running out of IPv4 addresses (something which, at the highest level, has already happened; see the discussion at the end of 1.10 IP - Internet Protocol). Another important issue is that IPv4 requires (or used to require) a modest amount of effort at configuration; IPv6 was supposed to improve this.11: UDP Transport
The standard transport protocols riding above the IP layer are TCP and UDP. As we saw in Chapter 1, UDP provides simple datagram delivery to remote sockets, that is, to 〈host,port〉 pairs. TCP provides a much richer functionality for sending data, but requires that the remote socket first be connected. In this chapter, we start with the much-simpler UDP, including the UDP-based Trivial File Transfer Protocol.