1. Define Data communication.
Explain characteristics of data communication and
components of data communication with neat diagram
Data communications are the exchange of data between two devices via some form of transmission
medium.
characteristics: delivery, accuracy, timeliness, and jitter.
1. Delivery. The system must deliver data to the correct destination. Data must be received by the
intended device or user and only by that device or user.
2. Accuracy. The system must deliver the data accurately. Data that have been altered in transmission and
left uncorrected are unusable.
3. Timeliness. The system must deliver data in a timely manner. Data delivered late are useless. In the case
of video and audio, timely delivery means delivering data as they are produced, in the same order that
they are produced, and without significant delay. This kind of delivery is called real-time transmission.
4. Jitter. Jitter refers to the variation in the packet arrival time. It is the uneven delay in the delivery of
audio or video packets. For example, let us assume that video packets are sent every 30 ms. If some of the
packets arrive with 30-ms delay and others with 40-ms delay, an uneven quality in the video is the result.
Components
A data communications system has five components
1. Message. The message is the information (data) to be communicated. Popular forms of information
include text, numbers, pictures, audio, and video.
2. Sender. The sender is the device that sends the data message. It can be a computer, workstation,
telephone handset, video camera, and so on.
3. Receiver. The receiver is the device that receives the message. It can be a computer, workstation,
telephone handset, television, and so on.
4. Transmission medium. The transmission medium is the physical path by which a message travels from
sender to receiver. Some examples of transmission media include twisted-pair wire, coaxial cable, fiber-
optic cable, and radio waves.
5. Protocol. A protocol is a set of rules that govern data communications. It represents an agreement
between the communicating devices. Without a protocol, two devices may be connected but not
communicating, just as a person speaking French cannot be understood by a person who speaks only
Japanese.
2. Demonstrate OSI Reference model with a neat diagram.
3. Define Topology. explain different types of topologies (with diagram) with advantages
and disadvantages.
Bus Topology
The bus topology is designed in such a way that all the stations are connected through a single cable
known as a backbone cable.
Each node is either connected to the backbone cable by drop cable or directly connected to the
backbone cable.
When a node wants to send a message over the network, it puts a message over the network. All the
stations available in the network will receive the message whether it has been addressed or not.
Advantages of bus topology
It works very efficiently well when there is a small network.
Very cost-effective as compared to another network topology.
Easy to expand by joining the two cables together.
Disadvantages of Bus Topology
Bus topology is not good for large networks.
A fault or break in the network breaks entire transmission.
This network topology is very slow as compared to other topologies.
Security is very low.
RING TOPOLOGY
It is like a bus topology in a closed loop.
All devices are connected point to point in a shape of ring.
A signal is passed along the ring from one device to another device until it reaches its destination.
Sending and receiving data takes place with the help of token.
Data flow is unidirectional.
Advantages of Ring topology:
Network Management: Faulty devices can be removed from the network without bringing the network
down.
Product availability: Many hardware and software tools for network operation and monitoring are
available.
Cost: Twisted pair cabling is inexpensive and easily available. Therefore, the installation cost is very low.
Reliable: It is a more reliable network because the communication system is not dependent on the
single host computer.
Disadvantages of Ring topology:
Difficult troubleshooting: It requires specialized test equipment to determine the cable faults. If any
fault occurs in the cable, then it would disrupt the communication for all the nodes.
Failure: The breakdown in one station leads to the failure of the overall network.
Reconfiguration difficult: Adding new devices to the network would slow down the network.
Delay: Communication delay is directly proportional to the number of nodes. Adding new devices
increases the communication delay.
STAR TOPOLOGY
Star topology is an arrangement of the network in which every node is connected to the central hub,
switch or a central computer. All the data or traffic must pass through the hub or switch
The central computer is known as a server, and the peripheral devices attached to the server are
known as clients.
Coaxial cable or RJ-45 cables are used to connect the computers.
Hubs or Switches are mainly used as connection devices in a physical star topology.
Star topology is the most popular topology in network implementation.
Advantages of Star topology:
Efficient troubleshooting: Troubleshooting is quite efficient in a star topology. In a star topology, all the
stations are connected to the centralized network. Therefore, the network administrator has to go to
the single station to troubleshoot the problem.
Network control: Complex network control features can be easily implemented in the star topology.
Any changes made in the star topology are automatically accommodated.
Limited failure: As each station is connected to the central hub with its own cable, therefore failure in
one cable will not affect the entire network.
Easily expandable: It is easily expandable as new stations can be added to the open ports on the hub.
Cost effective: Star topology networks are cost-effective as it uses inexpensive coaxial cable.
Disadvantages of Star topology:
A Central point of failure: If the central hub or switch goes down, then all the connected nodes will not
be able to communicate with each other.
Cable: Sometimes cable routing becomes difficult when a significant amount of routing is required.
MESH TOPOLOGY
Each node is connected to every other node in the network.
distance, traffic congestion, and link quality.
This type of network is often used in large organizations or companies because it can handle a large
amount of data traffic and can be easily expanded.
Advantages of Mesh Topology
Data can be transmitted from different devices simultaneously. It can withstand high traffic.
Failure during a single device won’t break the network.
Fault tolerant and reliable: Even if one connection breaks, the network keeps sending data through
other paths.
It provides high privacy and security.
Disadvantages of Mesh Topology
Overall cost of the network is too high compared to another topology.
Setup and maintenance of this topology is very difficult.
4. Explain TCP/IP Protocol Suite with diagram
Physical Layer
We can say that the physical layer is responsible for carrying individual bits in a frame across the link.
Although the physical layer is the lowest level in the TCP/IP protocol suite, the communication between
two devices at the physical layer is still a logical communication because there is another, hidden layer,
the transmission media, under the physical layer.
Two devices are connected by a transmission medium (cable or air).
We need to know that the transmission medium does not carry bits; it carries electrical or optical
signals.
So the bits received in a frame from the data-link layer are transformed and sent through the
transmission media, but we can think that the logical unit between two physical layers in two devices is
a bit.
There are several protocols that transform a bit to a signal.
Data-link Layer
We have seen that an internet is made up of several links (LANs and WANs) connected by routers.
There may be several overlapping sets of links that a datagram can travel from the host to the
destination.
The routers are responsible for choosing the best links.
However, when the next link to travel is determined by the router, the data-link layer is responsible for
taking the datagram and moving it across the link.
The link can be a wired LAN with a link-layer switch, a wireless LAN, a wired WAN, or a wireless WAN.
We can also have different protocols used with any link type.
In each case, the data-link layer is responsible for moving the packet through the link. TCP/IP does not
define any specific protocol for the data-link layer.
It supports all the standard and proprietary protocols. Any protocol that can take the datagram and
carry it through the link suffices for the network layer.
The data-link layer takes a datagram and encapsulates it in a packet called a frame. Each link-layer
protocol may provide a different service.
Some link-layer protocols provide complete error detection and correction; some provide only error
correction.
Network Layer
The network layer is responsible for creating a connection between the source computer and the
destination computer.
The communication at the network layer is host-to-host.
However, since there can be several routers from the source to the destination, the routers in the path
are responsible for choosing the best route for each packet.
We can say that the network layer is responsible for host-to-host communication and routing the packet
through possible routes.
Again, we may ask ourselves why we need the network layer. We could have added the routing duty to
the transport layer and dropped this layer.
One reason, as we said before, is the separation of different tasks between different layers.
The second reason is that the routers do not need the application and transport layers.
Separating the tasks allows us to use fewer protocols on the routers.
The network layer in the Internet includes the main protocol, Internet Protocol (IP), that defines the
format of the packet, called a datagram at the network layer.
IP also defines the format and the structure of addresses used in this layer.
IP is also responsible for routing a packet from its source to its destination, which is achieved by each
router forwarding the datagram to the next router in its path.
IP is a connectionless protocol that provides no flow control, no error control, and no congestion
control services.
This means that if any of these services is required for an application, the application should rely only
on the transport-layer protocol.
The network layer also includes unicast (one-to-one) and multicast (one-to-many) routing protocols.
A routing protocol does not take part in routing (it is the responsibility of IP), but it creates forwarding
tables for routers to help them in the routing process.
The network layer also has some auxiliary protocols that help IP in its delivery and routing tasks.
The Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) helps IP to report some problems when routing a
packet.
The Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) is another protocol that helps IP in multitasking.
The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) helps IP to get the network-layer address for a host.
The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is a protocol that helps IP to find the link-layer address of a host
or a router when its network-layer address is given.
Transport Layer
The logical connection at the transport layer is also end-to-end.
The transport layer at the source host gets the message from the application layer, encapsulates it in a
transport layer packet (called a segment or a user datagram in different protocols) and sends it,
through the logical (imaginary) connection, to the transport layer at the destination host.
In other words, the transport layer is responsible for giving services to the application layer: to get a
message from an application program running on the source host and deliver it to the corresponding
application program on the destination host.
We may ask why we need an end-to-end transport layer when we already have an end- to-end
application layer.
The reason is the separation of tasks and duties, which we discussed earlier.
The transport layer should be independent of the application layer.
In addition, we will see that we have more than one protocol in the transport layer, which means that
each application program can use the protocol that best matches its requirement.
As we said, there are a few transport-layer protocols in the Internet, each designed for some specific
task.
The main protocol, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), is a connection-oriented protocol that first
establishes a logical connection between transport layers at two hosts before transferring data.
It creates a logical pipe between two TCPs for transferring a stream of bytes.
TCP provides flow control (matching the sending data rate of the source host with the receiving data
rate of the destination host to prevent overwhelming the destination), error control (to guarantee that
the segments arrive at the destination without error and resending the corrupted ones), and congestion
control to reduce the loss of segments due to congestion in the network.
The other common protocol, User Datagram Protocol (UDP), is a connectionless protocol that
transmits user datagrams without first creating a logical connection.
In UDP, each user datagram is an independent entity without being related to the previous or the next
one (the meaning of the term connectionless).
UDP is a simple protocol that does not provide flow, error, or congestion control.
Its simplicity, which means small overhead, is attractive to an application program that needs to send
short messages and cannot afford the retransmission of the packets involved in TCP, when a packet is
corrupted or lost.
A new protocol, Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is designed to respond to new
applications that are emerging in the multimedia.
Application Layer
As Figure 2.6 shows, the logical connection between the two application layers is end to-end.
The two application layers exchange messages between each other as though there were a bridge
between the two layers.
However, we should know that the communication is done through all the layers.
Communication at the application layer is between two processes (two programs running at this
layer).
To communicate, a process sends a request to the other process and receives a response. Process-to-
process communication is the duty of the application layer.
The application layer in the Internet includes many predefined protocols, but a user can also create a
pair of processes to be run at the two hosts.
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a vehicle for accessing the World Wide Web (WWW).
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the main protocol used in electronic mail (e-mail) service.
The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is used for transferring files from one host to another.
The Terminal Network (TELNET) and Secure Shell (SSH) are used for accessing a site remotely.
The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is used by an administrator to manage the Internet
at global and local levels.
The Domain Name System (DNS) is used by other protocols to find the network-layer address of a
computer.
The Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) is used to collect membership in a group.
5. Explain different types of networks. Define dataflow and explain its types with diagram.
