Introduction to Network

Layer
Dr Mohit Kumar
Dept. of Information Technology
National Institute of Technology
Jalandhar, Punjab, India
kumarmohit@nitj.ac.in

NITJ
1
 Outline

1 NETWORK-LAYER SERVICES

2 PACKET SWITCHING

3 NETWORK-LAYER PERFORMANCE

4 IPv4 ADDRESSES

5 FORWARDING OF IP PACKETS
1 NETWORK-LAYER SERVICES

Before discussing the network layer in the Internet

today, let’s briefly discuss the network-layer
services that, in general, are expected from a
network-layer protocol.

Figure 1 shows the communication between Alice

and Bob at the network layer.

This is the same scenario which is use to show the

communication at the physical and the data-link
layers, respectively.
Figure 1: Communication at the network layer
 1 Packetizing

The first duty of the network layer is definitely packetizing:

encapsulating the payload in a network-layer packet at the
source and decapsulating the payload from the network-layer
packet at the destination.

In other words, one duty of the network layer is to carry a

payload from the source to the destination without changing it
or using it.

The network layer is doing the service of a carrier such as the

postal office, which is responsible for delivery of packages
from a sender to a receiver without changing or using the
contents.
 2 Routing and Forwarding

Other duties of the network layer, which are as

important as the first, are routing and forwarding,
which are directly related to each other.
Figure 2: Forwarding process

Forwarding Send the packet

value out of interface 2
B Data B Data
2 NETWORK-LAYER PERFORMANCE

The upper-layer protocols that use the service

of the network layer expect to receive an ideal
service, but the network layer is not perfect.

The performance of a network can be

measured in terms of delay, throughput, and
packet loss.

Congestion control is an issue that can

improve the performance.
 2.1 Delay

All of us expect instantaneous response from a

network, but a packet, from its source to its
destination, encounters delays.

The delays in a network can be divided into four

types: transmission delay, propagation delay,
processing delay, and queuing delay.

Let us first discuss each of these delay types and then

show how to calculate a packet delay from the source
to the destination..
Transmission Delay:
It is simply time required to put data bits on the wire/communication medium. It depends
on length of packet and bandwidth of network.

Transmission Delay = Data size / bandwidth = (L/B) second

Propagation delay:
Time taken by the first bit to travel from sender to receiver end of the link.

Propagation delay = distance/transmission speed = d/s

Processing delay:

Processing delay = Time required to process a packet in a router or a destination host

Queuing delay:

Queuing delay: Time a packet waits in input and output queues in a router
 2.2 Throughput

Throughput at any point in a network is defined as the number

of bits passing through the point in a second, which is actually
the transmission rate of data at that point.

In a path from source to destination, a packet may pass

through several links (networks), each with a different
transmission rate.

How, then, can we determine the throughput of the whole

path? To see the situation, assume that we have three links,
each with a different transmission rate, as shown in Figure 10.
Figure 10: Throughput in a path with three links in a
series
Figure 11: A path through the Internet backbone
Figure 12: Effect of throughput in shared links
 2.3 Packet Loss

Another issue that severely affects the performance of

communication is the number of packets lost during
transmission.
When a router receives a packet while processing another
packet, the received packet needs to be stored in the input buffer
waiting for its turn.
A router, however, has an input buffer with a limited size. A time
may come when the buffer is full and the next packet needs to be
dropped.
The effect of packet loss on the Internet network layer is that the
packet needs to be resent, which in turn may create overflow and
cause more packet loss.
 2.4 Congestion Control

Congestion control is a mechanism for improving

performance.

Although congestion at the network layer is not explicitly

addressed in the Internet model, the study of congestion at this
layer may help us to better understand the cause of congestion
at the transport layer and find possible remedies to be used at
the network layer.

Congestion at the network layer is related to two issues,

throughput and delay, which we discussed in the previous
section.
Figure 13. Packet delay and throughput as functions of
load
 Logical Addressing

 A computer somewhere in the world needs to communicate with

another computer somewhere else in the world.
 Usually, computers communicate through the Internet.
 The packet transmitted by the sending computer may pass through
several LANs or WANs before reaching the destination computer.
 The Internet addresses are 32 bits in length; this gives us a
maximum of 232 addresses.
 These addresses are referred to as IPv4 (IP version 4) addresses or
simply IP addresses

18.18
3 IPv4 ADDRESSES

The identifier used in the IP layer of the TCP/IP protocol suite

to identify the connection of each device to the Internet is called
the Internet address or IP address.

IPv4 addresses are unique. They are unique in the sense that
each address defines one, and only one, connection to the
Internet.

Two devices on the Internet can never have the same address at
the same time.
 3.1 Address Space

A protocol like IPv4 that defines addresses has an address space.

An address space is the total number of addresses used by the

protocol.

If a protocol uses b bits to define an address, the address space is

2^b because each bit can have two different values (0 or 1).

IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses, which means that the address space
is 2^32 or 4,294,967,296 (more than four billion).

If there were no restrictions, more than 4 billion devices could be

connected to the Internet.
Figure 16: Three different notations in IPv4
addressing
Figure 17: Hierarchy in addressing
 3.2 Classful Addressing

When the Internet started, an IPv4 address was

designed with a fixed-length prefix, but to
accommodate both small and large networks, three
fixed-length prefixes were designed instead of one (n
= 8, n = 16, and n = 24).

The whole address space was divided into five classes

(class A, B, C, D, and E), as shown in Figure 18. This
scheme is referred to as classful addressing. Although
classful addressing belongs to the past, it helps us to
understand classless addressing, discussed later.
Figure 18: Occupation of the address space in classful
addressing
 Netid, Hostid and Mask

 An IP address of class A, B and C is divided into netid and

hosted.
 These parts are of varying lengths, depending on the class of
the address.
 Although the length of netid and hosted is predetermined in
classful addressing, we can also use a mask, a 32 number
made of contiguous 1’s followed by contiguous 0s.

18.25
 Subnetting and Supernetting

Subnetting: If an organization was granted a large block in class

A or B, it could divide the addresses into several contiguous
groups and assign each group to smaller networks called subnets.

Supernetting: An organization can combine several class C

blocks to create a larger range of addresses.

18.26
 3.3 Classless Addressing

With the growth of the Internet, it was clear that a larger

address space was needed as a long-term solution.

The larger address space, however, requires that the length of

IP addresses also be increased, which means the format of the
IP packets needs to be changed.

Although the long-range solution has already been devised and

is called IPv6, a short-term solution was also devised to use the
same address space but to change the distribution of addresses
to provide a fair share to each organization.

The short-term solution still uses IPv4 addresses, but it is

called classless addressing.
 Classless addressing
 To simplify the handling of addresses, the internet authorities impose three
restrictions on classless address blocks
• The addresses in the block must be contiguous, one after another.
• The number of addresses in a block must be power of 2.
• The first address must be evenly divisible by the number of addresses.
•

18.28
Figure 20: Slash notation (CIDR)
Figure 21: Information extraction in classless
addressing
Example 1
A classless address is given as 167.199.170.82/27. We can
find the above three pieces of information as follows. The
number of addresses in the network is 2 32− n = 25 = 32
addresses. The first address can be found by keeping the
first 27 bits and changing the rest of the bits to 0s.

The last address can be found by keeping the first 27 bits

and changing the rest of the bits to 1s.
Example 2
We repeat Example 1 using the mask. The mask in dotted-
decimal notation is 256.256.256.224 The AND, OR, and
NOT operations can be applied to individual bytes using
calculators and applets at the book website.
Example 3
In classless addressing, an address cannot per se define the
block the address belongs to. For example, the address
230.8.24.56 can belong to many blocks. Some of them are
shown below with the value of the prefix associated with
that block.
Figure 22: Network address
Example 4
An ISP has requested a block of 1000 addresses. Since 1000
is not a power of 2, 1024 addresses are granted. The prefix
length is calculated as n = 32 − log21024 = 22. An available
block, 18.14.12.0/22, is granted to the ISP. It can be seen
that the first address in decimal is 302,910,464, which is
divisible by 1024.
Example 5
An organization is granted a block of addresses with the
beginning address 14.24.74.0/24. The organization needs to
have 3 subblocks of addresses to use in its three subnets:
one subblock of 10 addresses, one subblock of 60 addresses,
and one subblock of 120 addresses. Design the subblocks.

Solution
There are 232– 24 = 256 addresses in this block. The first
address is 14.24.74.0/24; the last address is 14.24.74.255/24.
To satisfy the third requirement, we assign addresses to
subblocks, starting with the largest and ending with the
smallest one.
Example 5 (continued)
a. The number of addresses in the largest subblock, which
requires 120 addresses, is not a power of 2. We allocate 128
addresses. The subnet mask for this subnet can be found as
n1 = 32 − log2 128 = 25. The first address in this block is
14.24.74.0/25; the last address is 14.24.74.127/25.

b. The number of addresses in the second largest subblock,

which requires 60 addresses, is not a power of 2 either. We
allocate 64 addresses. The subnet mask for this subnet can
be found as n2 = 32 − log2 64 = 26. The first address in this
block is 14.24.74.128/26; the last address is
14.24.74.191/26.
Example 5 (continued)
c. The number of addresses in the largest subblock, which
requires 120 addresses, is not a power of 2. We allocate 128
addresses. The subnet mask for this subnet can be found as
n1 = 32 − log2 128 = 25. The first address in this block is
14.24.74.0/25; the last address is 14.24.74.127/25.

If we add all addresses in the previous subblocks, the result

is 208 addresses, which means 48 addresses are left in
reserve. The first address in this range is 14.24.74.208. The
last address is 14.24.74.255. We don’t know about the
prefix length yet. Figure 18.23 shows the configuration of
blocks. We have shown the first address in each block.
Figure 23: Solution to Example 4.5
Example 6
Figure 24 shows how four small blocks of addresses are
assigned to four organizations by an ISP. The ISP combines
these four blocks into one single block and advertises the
larger block to the rest of the world. Any packet destined for
this larger block should be sent to this ISP. It is the
responsibility of the ISP to forward the packet to the
appropriate organization. This is similar to routing we can
find in a postal network. All packages coming from outside
a country are sent first to the capital and then distributed to
the corresponding destination.
Figure 24: Example of address aggregation
 4.4 DHCP

After a block of addresses are assigned to an

organization, the network administration can
manually assign addresses to the individual hosts or
routers. However, address assignment in an
organization can be done automatically using the
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP).
DHCP is an application-layer program, using the
client-server paradigm, that actually helps TCP/IP
at the network layer.
Figure 25: DHCP message format
Figure 26: Option format
Figure 27: Operation of DHCP
 4.5 NAT

In most situations, only a portion of computers in a

small network need access to the Internet
simultaneously.
A technology that can provide the mapping between
the private and universal addresses, and at the same
time support virtual private networks, is Network
Address Translation (NAT).
The technology allows a site to use a set of private
addresses for internal communication and a set of
global Internet addresses (at least one) for
communication with the rest of the world.
Figure 29: NAT
Figure 30: Address translation
Figure 31: Translation
Table 1: Five-column translation table