Chapter Five

Local Area Networking Technology

 Introduction
• A local area network (LAN) is a data communication network
that serves users in a confined geographic area and uses high
transmission speeds (typically 10 mbps to few gbps)
• Designed and developed for communications and resource
sharing in a local work environment (room, campus,
building).
• A single shared medium, usually a cable, to which computers
can attach.
• Because sharing occurs:
– Cost decreases
– Computers have to coordinate the use of the network
• LANs operate at the physical and data link layers
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• In OSI terms, higher layer protocols (layer 3 or 4 and above)
are independent of network architecture and are applicable to
LANs, MANs, and WANs
• LAN protocols is concerned principally with lower layers
(Layer 1 and 2) of the OSI model
• IEEE 802 reference model

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• the lowest layer of the IEEE 802 reference model
corresponds to the physical layer
• Includes functions:
– Encoding/decoding of signals
– Preamble generation/removal (for synchronization)
– Bit transmission/reception

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• The functions associated with providing service to LAN
users include:
– On transmission, assemble data into a frame with address and
error-detection fields.
– On reception, disassemble frame, perform address recognition
and error detection.
– Govern access to the LAN transmission medium.
– Provide an interface to higher layers and perform flow and
error control

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 Access Methods
• broadcast channels are sometimes referred to as multi-
access channels or random access channels.
• The methods that can be used to determine how the shared
media is accessed are called Access methods.
• The protocols used to determine who goes next on a multi-
access channel.
– It belongs to the sub-layer of the data link layer called MAC
(Medium Access Control) sub-layer
• The MAC sub-layer is especially important in LANs,
– many of LANs use a multi-access channel as the basis for
communication.
– WANs, in contrast, use point-to-point links, except for satellite
networks
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• Pure ALOHA
– The earliest of access methods
– was developed for packet radio networks
– is also applicable to any shared transmission medium
– is a true free-for-all
– The station waits for
• an amount of time (The maximum round-trip propagation delay
on the network)
– twice the time it takes to send a frame between the two most widely
separated stations
• plus a small fixed time increment
– If the station fails to receive an acknowledgment after repeated
transmissions, it gives up.
– Collision happens if two stations send frame at the same time.
– As the number of collisions rises rapidly with increased load,
the maximum utilization of the channel is only about 18%
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• Slotted ALOHA
– time on the channel is organized into uniform slots whose size
equals the frame transmission time.
– Some central clock or other technique is needed to synchronize
all stations.
– Transmission is permitted to begin only at a slot boundary.
– still collision is possible;
– collided packets are retransmitted after a random delay

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• CSMA - Carrier Sense MA - polite version of ALOHA
– to minimize the chance of collision, each station first listens to
the medium before sending; “listen before talk”
– if the channel is busy, it waits until it is idle. Otherwise it
transmits.
– if a collision occurs, it waits a random amount of time and
starts listening again.
– the chance of collision is minimized, but may still occur
because of
• the propagation delay (a station doesn’t know if another one has
just started transmitting);
• or if two or more stations start transmitting at the same time

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 t1 < t2 < t3 < t4 < t5

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

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2. persistent: sense a line and “send” if it is idle; otherwise
listen; two variations
• 1-persistent: if the line is idle, send immediately (with
probability 1).
• p-persistent: if the line is idle, send with probability p and
refrain from sending with probability 1-p; if p = 0.2, then a
station sends 20% of the time that a line is idle, and refrains
from sending 80% of the time
– it reduces the chance of collision and improves efficiency;
depends on the value of p

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

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₋ sending a jam alerts to the other stations and also to discard
the part of the frame received
₋ used in traditional Ethernet; CSMA was never implemented
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• CSMA/CA - CSMA with Collision Avoidance
₋ avoids collision
₋ uses one of the persistence strategies;
₋ after it finds the line idle, it waits an IFG (interframe gap)
amount of time;
• it then waits another random amount of time;
• after that it sends the frame and sets a timer;
• if it receives an ack before the timer expires, the transmission is
successful;
• otherwise something is wrong (the frame or the ack is lost);
• waits for a backoff amount of time and re-senses the line
₋ used in wireless LANs

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 16
 the frame or the ack is lost
• Token Passing
₋ a station is authorized to send data when it receives a special
frame called a token.
₋ the stations are arranged around a ring (each station has a
predecessor and a successor)
₋ a token circulates around the ring when no data is transmitted
₋ token: a bit sequence
• free token: 01111110
• busy token: 01111111
₋ when a node wants to transmit
• wait for free token
• remove token from ring (replace with busy token)
• transmit message
• when done transmitting, replace free token on ring 17
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 ₋ token failures: tokens can be created or destroyed by noise
₋ distributed solution
• nodes are allowed to recognize the loss of a token and create a
new token
• collision occurs when two or more nodes create a new token at
the same time => need collision resolution algorithms
₋ node failures: since each node must relay all incoming data,
the failure of a single node will disrupt the operation of the ring

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 Ethernet
1. Traditional Ethernet (IEEE 802.3)
₋ the most popular LAN physical network architecture in use
today
₋ originally created in 1976 at Xerox’s Palo Alta Research
Center (not a commercial success for itself) to operate at 10
Mbps
• usually called traditional Ethernet.
₋ uses 1-persistent CSMA/CD
₋ an Ethernet frame contains 7 fields

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 to alert the recieving system to the coming frame

Data and
Padding

 PDU - Protocol Data Unit

₋ minimum and maximum frame lengths are defined without the
preamble and the SFD.
₋ padding is used if the packet size is less than the minimum
packet size.

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

• Unicast, Multicast, and Broadcast addresses:

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

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₋ four most common kinds of 10 Mbps Ethernet cabling

₋ Where
• 10 - 10 Mbps
• Base - Baseband (against broadband with more bandwidth than
standard telephone service)
• 5 (2) - maximum segment length; rounded to units of 100 meters
(for coax)
• T - Twisted Pair, F - Fiber
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₋ a hub is used in 10Base-T and 10Base-F to which each station
is connected by a dedicated cable.
₋ 10Base5 is also called Thick Ethernet and 10Base2 is Thin
Ethernet
₋ 10Base5 and 10Base2 use bus topology;
₋ 10Base-T and 10Base-F use star topology
₋ Segmentation (of a network not a frame)
• performance depends on the number of stations.
• the more stations we have the less will be the performance.
• when a lot of stations have data to transmit, the network gets
congested, and many collisions occur
• in a network with severe congestion, there may actually be
more collisions occurring on the network than data being
transmitted 24
 • Solution: Segmentation
₋ the process of splitting a large Ethernet network into two or
more segments linked by routers
₋ the resulting segments have fewer stations to contend with for
access to the network
₋ the router transfers data from one segment to the other only
when the destination for the data is on the other segment
₋ the rest of the network traffic stays within the segment where
it belongs

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2. Fast Ethernet (IEEE 802.3u)
₋ the need for a higher data rate resulted in the design of the
Fast Ethernet protocol (100 Mbps)
₋ basic idea: keep all the old frame formats, interfaces, and
procedural rules, but reduce the bit time from 100 ns (10
Mbps) to 10 ns (100 Mbps)
₋ a new feature, called auto-negotiation, is added to allow
• incompatible devices to communicate with one another,
• e.g. one with 10 Mbps and one with 100 Mbps - backward
compatibility)
• one device to have multiple capabilities
• a station to check a hub’s capabilities
 the three most common kinds of Fast Ethernet cabling

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

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 Token Bus (IEEE 802.4)
• proposed by General Motors
• the stations on the bus form a logical ring,
₋ i.e., the stations are assigned logical positions in an ordered
sequence, with the last member followed by the first
• the physical ordering of the stations on the bus is irrelevant
and independent of the logical ordering;
• it has ring logical topology and bus physical topology
• it uses token passing medium access control protocol

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 10 20 30 40 50 60

• in the example, stations 60, 50, 30, and 10, in that order, are
part of the logical ring
₋ station 60 passes the token to 50, which in turn passes it to 30,
then to 10, then back to 60;
₋ stations 20 and 40 are not part of the logical ring
• each participating station knows the address of its
predecessor and successor
• the logical ring is created and maintained dynamically in
such a way that the stations are logically ordered in
numerically descending order of MAC address,
• except that the station with the lowest address is followed
by the station with the highest address 30
• the token bus system requires considerable maintenance;
• one or more stations must perform the following functions,
at minimum:
₋ addition to the ring:
₋ periodically non-participating stations must be granted the
opportunity to join the logical ring
₋ deletion from the ring:
₋ a station can remove itself from the logical ring
₋ ring initialization:
₋ when the network is started, some procedure is needed to sort
out who goes first, who goes second, and so on
₋ token recovery:
₋ if the token is lost due to a transmission error or station failure,
some means of recovery is needed
• nobody uses it  31
 Token Ring (IEEE 802.5)
• introduced by IBM in early 1980’s
• has ring logical topology;
• the physical topology can be ring or star
• it uses token passing medium access control protocol
• Only a host that holds a token can send data, and tokens are
released when receipt of the data is confirmed.
• Token ring networks prevent data packets from colliding on
a network segment.
• The IEEE standard version provides for data transfer rates
of 4, 16 or 100 Mbps.

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• was once widely used on LANs, but has been nearly entirely
displaced by Ethernet thanks to pricing.
– token ring products tended to be more expensive than Ethernet
at similar speeds
• still in use at some IBM sites; but virtually nowhere else

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• Ethernet Vs. Token Ring

Ethernet Token Ring

Access is non-deterministic Access is deterministic
(contention-based CSMA/CD)
Supports a direct-cable connection Doesn’t support direct cable
between two NICs connection. Requires additional
software and hardware
Alleviates collision by CSMA and Eliminates collision by the use of a
by the use of an intelligent switch single-use token and early token
release to alleviate the down time
Less expensive More expensive

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 References
1. https://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/definition/Token-
Ring
2. https://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/definition/Ethernet
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_ring

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