Week # 03

Introduction to Computer Networks

1) Computer Networks
* In a broader sense, a network consists of two or more entities\objects sharing resources and information.
* Some general examples of networks are radio network, TV networks, family network, friends network,
social networks, restaurant network etc.
* A computer network is defined as a system for connecting computers using a single transmission
technology. (or)
* A system of interconnected computers and peripherals such as printers is called computer network. (or)
* A computer network is an interconnection of computers and computing equipment using either wires or
radio waves and can share data and computing resources. (or)
* A computer network is a system in which multiple devices are connected to each other to share
information and resources.
* A device can be a host (end system) such as a large computer, desktop, laptop, workstation, cellular
phone, or security system.
* A device can also be a connecting device such as a router, which connects the network to other networks,
a switch, which connects devices together, a modem, which changes the form of data, and so on.
* The Internet is the largest network in the world, which connects millions of people all over the world.

2) Advantages of Computer Networks

* Some advantages of computer networks are:
- Resource sharing
- Data sharing
- Save cost
- Data management
- Access to information
- Fastest (and cheapest) mean of communications

Dr. Kifayat Ullah Computer Communication & Networks CECOS University Peshawar
 - Remote access and login (Access from anywhere)
- Online data storage (Cloud based)
- Multi user\player games
- E-mail
- E-Commerce
- News Groups
- Video conferencing
- Video streaming
- Internet Telephony (VoIP)
- Instant Messages
- File transfer

3) Uses of Compute Networks

* Computer networks is an integral part of our everyday life.
* Following are some application areas of computer networks.

3.a) Business Applications

* Most companies have a substantial number of computers.
* These computers are connected in order to distribute information throughout the company.
* Make all programs, equipment, and especially data available to anyone on the network without regard to
the physical location of the resource or the user.
* An example is having a group of office workers share a common printer.
- Even more important than sharing physical resources such as printers, is sharing information.

* For smaller companies, all the computers are likely to be in a single office or perhaps a single building,
but for larger ones, the computers and employees may be scattered over dozens of offices in many
countries.
* Networks called VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) may be used to join the individual networks at
different sites into one extended network.

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* Normally the companies uses client-server model.
* It is widely used and forms the basis of much network usage.
* In this model, the data are stored on powerful computers called servers.
* Servers are normally maintained by a system administrator.
* In contrast, the employees have simpler machines, called clients, on their desks, with which they access
remote data.
* The client and server machines are connected by a network, as illustrated in the following figure.

* Another goal of setting up a computer network is that it provides a powerful communication medium
among employees.
* Virtually every company that has two or more computers now has email (electronic mail), which
employees generally use for a great deal of daily communication.
* Telephone calls between employees may be carried by the computer network instead of by the phone
company. This technology is called IP telephony or Voice over IP (VoIP) when Internet technology is used.
* Video can be added to audio so that employees at distant locations can see and hear each other as they
hold a meeting.
* This technique is a powerful tool for eliminating the cost and time previously devoted to travel.
* Desktop sharing lets remote workers see and interact with a graphical computer screen.
* This makes it easy for two or more people who work far apart to write a report together.
* Another goal for many companies is doing business electronically, especially with customers and
suppliers.
* This new model is called e-commerce (electronic commerce) and it has grown rapidly in recent years.
* Consequently, many companies provide catalogs of their goods and services online and take orders online.

3.b) Home Applications

* People initially bought computers for word processing and games.
* Recently, the biggest reason to buy a home computer was probably for Internet access.
*As with companies, home users can access information, communicate with other people, and buy
products and services with e-commerce.
* Access to remote information comes in many forms.

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* It can be surfing the World Wide Web for information or just for fun.
* Many newspapers have gone online and can be personalized.
* The next step beyond newspapers is the online digital library.
* Many professional organizations, such as the ACM, and the IEEE Computer Society, already have all their
journals and conference proceedings online.
* Much of this information is accessed using the client-server model, but there is different, popular model
for accessing information that goes by the name of peer-to-peer communication.
* In this form, individuals who form a loose group can communicate with others in the group, as shown in
the following figure.
* Every person can, in principle, communicate with one or more other people; there is no fixed division into
clients and servers.

* Many peer-to-peer systems, such BitTorrent, do not have any central database of content. Instead, each
user maintains his own database locally and provides a list of other nearby people who are members of the
system.
* Peer-to-peer communication is often used to share music and videos.
* The second broad category of network use is person-to-person communication.
- The 21st century’s answer to the 19th century’s telephone.
* E-mail is already used on a daily basis by millions of people all over the world and its use is growing
rapidly.
* Teenagers are addicted to instant messaging.
* There are multi-person messaging services too, such as the Twitter service that lets people send short text
messages called ‘‘tweets’’ to their circle of friends or other willing audiences.
* The Internet can be used by applications to carry audio (e.g., Internet radio stations) and video (e.g.,
YouTube).
* Social network applications is another area.
* One of the most popular social networking sites is Facebook.
* It lets people update their personal profiles and shares the updates with other people who they have
declared to be their friends.
* Another category is electronic commerce.

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* Home shopping is already popular and enables users to inspect the online catalogs of thousands of
companies.
* E-commerce is also widely used is access to financial institutions.
* Many people already pay their bills, manage their bank accounts, and handle their investments
electronically.
* One area that virtually nobody foresaw is electronic flea markets.
* Online auctions of second-hand goods have become a massive industry.
* Unlike traditional e-commerce, which follows the client-server model, online auctions are peer-to-peer in
the sense that consumers can act as both buyers and sellers.
* Another category is entertainment, which includes distribution of music, radio and television programs,
and movies over the Internet.
* Users can find, buy, and download MP3 songs and DVD-quality movies and add them to their personal
collection.
* TV shows now reach many homes via IPTV (IP TeleVision) systems that are based on IP technology
instead of cable TV or radio transmissions.
* Media streaming applications let users tune into Internet radio stations or watch recent episodes of their
favorite TV shows.
* Another form of entertainment is game playing.
* Another category is ubiquitous computing, in which computing is embedded into everyday life.
* Many homes are already wired with security systems that include door and window sensors, and there
are many more sensors that can be folded in to a smart home monitor, such as energy consumption.
* Your electricity, gas and water meters could also report usage over the network.
* Increasingly, consumer electronic devices are networked.
* For example, some high-end cameras already have a wireless network capability and use it to send photos
to a nearby display for viewing.

3.c) Mobile Users

* People on the go often want to use their mobile devices to read and send email, tweet, watch movies,
download music, play games, or simply to surf the Web for information.
* They want to do all of the things they do at home and in the office.
* Since having a wired connection is impossible in cars, boats, and airplanes, there is a lot of interest in
wireless networks.
* Cellular networks are one familiar kind of wireless network that blankets us with coverage for mobile
phones.
* Wireless hotspots based on the 802.11 standard are another kind of wireless network for mobile
computers.

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* Anyone with a laptop computer and a wireless modem can just turn on their computer on and be connected
to the Internet through the hotspot, as though the computer were plugged into a wired network.
* Although wireless networking and mobile computing are often related, they are not identical.

* Perhaps the key driver of mobile, wireless applications is the mobile phone.
* Text messaging or texting is tremendously popular.
* Smart phones, such as the popular iPhone, combine aspects of mobile phones and mobile computers.
* The (3G and 4G) cellular networks to which they connect can provide fast data services for using the
Internet as well as handling phone calls.
* Since mobile phones know their locations, often because they are equipped with GPS (Global
Positioning System) receivers, some services are intentionally location dependent.
* Mobile maps and directions are an obvious candidate as your GPS-enabled phone and car probably have
a better idea of where you are than you do.
* Sensor networks are made up of nodes that gather and wirelessly relay information they sense about
the state of the physical world.
* For example, your car might gather data on its location, speed, vibration, and fuel efficiency from its on-
board diagnostic system and upload this information to a database.
* Those data can help find potholes, plan trips around congested roads.
* Wearable computers are another promising application.
* Smart watches with radios have been part of our mental space since their appearance.

3. d) Social Issues
* Computer networks allow ordinary citizens to distribute and view content in ways that were not
previously possible.
* But along with the good comes the bad, as this new-found freedom brings with it many unsolved social,
political, and ethical issues.
* Social networks, message boards, content sharing sites allow people to share their views with like-
minded individuals.
* Views that are publicly posted may be deeply offensive to some people.
* Furthermore, opinions need not be limited to text; high-resolution color photographs and video clips are
easily shared over computer networks.

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* Some people take a live-and-let-live view, but others feel that posting certain material (e.g., verbal
attacks on particular countries or religions, pornography, etc.) is simply unacceptable and that such
content must be censored.
* In the past, people have sued network operators, claiming that they are responsible for the contents of
what they carry, just as newspapers and magazines are.
* A network is like a telephone company or the post office and cannot be expected to police what its
users say.
* Computer networks make it possible for the people who run the network to snoop on the traffic.
* This sets up conflicts over issues such as employee rights versus employer rights.
* Many people read and write email at work.
* Many employers have claimed the right to read and possibly censor employee messages.
* Another conflict is centered around government versus citizen’s rights.
* The FBI has installed systems at many Internet service providers to snoop on all incoming and
outgoing email for nuggets of interest.
* The government does not have a monopoly on threatening people’s privacy.
* A new twist with mobile devices is location privacy.
* As part of the process of providing service to your mobile device the network operators learn where you
are at different times of day.
* This allows them to track your movements.
* Electronic junk mail (spam) has become a part of life because spammers have collected millions of
email addresses and would-be marketers can cheaply send computer-generated messages to them.
* Web pages and email messages containing active content (basically, programs or macros that execute on
the receiver’s machine) can contain viruses that take over your computer.
* They might be used to steal your bank account passwords.

4) History of Internet
* The Internet is not really a network at all, but a vast collection of different networks that use certain
common protocols and provide certain common services.
* It is an unusual system in that it was not planned by anyone and is not controlled by anyone.
* How it has developed and why?

4.a) Early History

* There were some communication networks, such as telegraph and telephone networks, before 1960.
* These networks were suitable for constant-rate communication at that time, which means that after a
connection was made between two users, the encoded message (telegraphy) or voice (telephony) could
be exchanged.

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* A computer network, on the other hand, should be able to handle bursty data, which means data
received at variable rates at different times.
* The world needed to wait for the packet-switched network to be invented.

Birth of Packet-Switched Networks

* The theory of packet switching for bursty traffic was first presented by Leonard Kleinrock in 1961 at
MIT.
* At the same time, two other researchers, Paul Baran at Rand Institute and Donald Davies at National
Physical Laboratory in England, published some papers about packet-switched networks.

ARPANET
* In the mid-1960s, mainframe computers in research organizations were stand-alone devices.
* Computers from different manufacturers were unable to communicate with one another.
* The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the Department of Defense (DOD) was interested
in finding a way to connect computers so that the researchers they funded could share their findings,
thereby reducing costs and eliminating duplication of effort.
* In 1967, at an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) meeting, ARPA presented its ideas for the
Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), a small network of connected computers.
* The idea was that each host computer (not necessarily from the same manufacturer) would be attached
to a specialized computer, called an Interface Message Processor (IMP).
* The IMPs, in turn, would be connected to each other.
* Each IMP had to be able to communicate with other IMPs as well as with its own attached host.
* By 1969, ARPANET was a reality.
* Four nodes, at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of California at Santa
Barbara (UCSB), Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and the University of Utah, were connected via the
IMPs to form a network.
* Software called the Network Control Protocol (NCP) provided communication between the hosts.

4.b) Birth of the Internet

* In 1972, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, both of whom were part of the core ARPANET group, collaborated
on what they called the Internetting Project.
* They wanted to link dissimilar networks so that a host on one network could communicate with a host
on another.
* There were many problems to overcome: diverse packet sizes, diverse interfaces, and diverse
transmission rates, as well as differing reliability requirements.
* Cerf and Kahn devised the idea of a device called a gateway to serve as the intermediary hardware to
transfer data from one network to another.

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TCP/IP
* Cerf and Kahn’s landmark 1973 paper outlined the protocols to achieve end-to-end delivery of data.
* This was a new version of NCP.
* This paper on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) included concepts such as encapsulation, the
datagram, and the functions of a gateway.
* This ARPA Internet now became the focus of the communication effort.
* Around this time, responsibility for the ARPANET was handed over to the Defense Communication
Agency (DCA).
* In October 1977, an internet consisting of three different networks (ARPANET, packet radio, and
packet satellite) was successfully demonstrated.
* Communication between networks was now possible.
* Shortly thereafter, authorities made a decision to split TCP into two protocols: Transmission Control
Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP).
* IP would handle datagram routing while TCP would be responsible for higher level functions such as
segmentation, reassembly, and error detection.
* The new combination became known as TCP/IP.
* In 1981, under a Defence Department contract, UC Berkeley modified the UNIX operating system to
include TCP/IP.
* The open implementation of the Berkeley UNIX gave every manufacturer a working code base on which
they could build their products.
* In 1983, authorities abolished the original ARPANET protocols, and TCP/IP became the official
protocol for the ARPANET.
* Those who wanted to use the Internet to access a computer on a different network had to be running
TCP/IP.

MILNET
* In 1983, ARPANET split into two networks: Military Network (MILNET) for military users and
ARPANET for nonmilitary users.

CSNET
* Another milestone in Internet history was the creation of CSNET in 1981.
* Computer Science Network (CSNET) was a network sponsored by the National Science Foundation
(NSF).
* The network was conceived by universities that were ineligible to join ARPANET due to an absence of
ties to the Department of Defense.
* CSNET was a less expensive network; there were no redundant links and the transmission rate was
slower.

Dr. Kifayat Ullah Computer Communication & Networks CECOS University Peshawar
* By the mid-1980s, most U.S. universities with computer science departments were part of CSNET.
* Other institutions and companies were also forming their own networks and using TCP/IP to
interconnect.

NSFNET
* With the success of CSNET, the NSF in 1986 sponsored the National Science Foundation Network
(NSFNET), a backbone that connected five supercomputer centers located throughout the United
States.
* In 1990, ARPANET was officially retired and replaced by NSFNET.

ANSNET
* In 1991, the U.S. government decided that NSFNET was not capable of supporting the rapidly
increasing Internet traffic.
* Three companies, IBM, Merit, and Verizon, filled the void by forming a nonprofit organization called
Advanced Network & Services (ANS) to build a new, high-speed Internet backbone called Advanced
Network Services Network (ANSNET).

4.c) Internet Today

* Today, we witness a rapid growth both in the infrastructure and new applications.
* The Internet today is a set of pier networks that provide services to the whole world.
* What has made the Internet so popular is the invention of new applications.

World Wide Web

* The 1990s saw the explosion of Internet applications due to the emergence of the World Wide Web
(WWW).
* The Web was invented at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee.
* This invention has added the commercial applications to the Internet.

Multimedia
* Recent developments in the multimedia applications such as voice over IP (telephony), video over IP
(Skype), view sharing (YouTube), and television over IP has increased the number of users and the amount
of time each user spends on the network.

Peer-to-Peer Applications
* Peer-to-peer networking is also a new area of communication with a lot of potential.

Dr. Kifayat Ullah Computer Communication & Networks CECOS University Peshawar
 Assignment No # 1
Topic: Network Topologies (e.g., Bus, Ring, Star, Mesh, Tree, Hybrid, etc.)
Submission Date: First class of next week (Week # 04)
No of Pages: 4-10
Instructions: Directly Copied\Photocopied from Internet\Class-Fellow will lead to ZERO
marks.

Dr. Kifayat Ullah Computer Communication & Networks CECOS University Peshawar