II TUTORIAL SHEET 2023 – 24

ELC4410
1. Customers arrive at a fast-food restaurant at a rate of 4 per minute and wait to receive their order for an average
of 4 minutes. Customers eat in the restaurant with probability ½ and carry out their order without eating with
probability ½. A meal requires an average of 16 minutes. What is the average number of customers in the
restaurant?
2. Messages arrive at a telephone exchange at a Poisson rate of 12000 in a busy hour on the average. What is the
probability of more than 1000 calls?
3. The average time T a car spends in a certain traffic system is related to the average number of cars N in the
system by a relation of the form T    N 2 , where  0,   0 are given scalars.
(i) What is the maximum car arrival rate λ* that the system can sustain?
(ii) When the car arrival rate is less than λ*, what is the average time a car spends in the system assuming
that the system reaches the steady state? Is there a unique answer?
4. Let 1 and 2 be two exponentially distributed, independent RVs with means 1/1 and 1/2 respectively. Show
that the RV min {1, 2} is exponentially distributed with mean 1/(1 + 2).
5. Consider a TDMA system of M stations. Each of these stations that is connected to the transmission medium
has its own buffer and is modeled as a separate multiplexer. Assume that frames (all are of equal length L) arrive
at each station with exponential inter-arrival times with mean λ / M frames/s and the channel capacity is R b/s.
Derive an expression of the normalized (to frame transmission time) average frame delay in the system.
6. 1000 stations on a pure aloha network share a 10 Mbps channel. If frames are 1000 bits long, find the efficiency
of each station is sending 100 frames/s.
7. A number of terminals use the pure aloha to communicate with a remote controller over 8000 b/s communication
channel. Each terminal transmits 800-bit message, on the average over every 1 min. What is the maximum
number of such terminals that may use the channel? Repeat for slotted aloha strategy. What if message length
is increased to 100 bits?
8. A slotted ALOHA network transmits 1024-bit frames using a shared channel with 2048 kbps
bandwidth. Find the throughput if the system produces (a) 1000 frames/s (b) 500 frames/s (c) 200
frames/s.
9. Consider the tree algorithm for collision resolution. Assume that after each collision, each packet involved in
the collision flips an unbiased coin to determine whether to go into the right or left subset.
(i) Given a collision of 5 packets, find the probability that 2 packets go into the left subset.
(ii) Let Ak be the expected number of slots required in a CRP involving k packets. Note that A0=A1=1 show
𝑘
that, for k > 1, 𝐴𝑘 = 1 + ∑𝑘𝑖=0 ( ) 2−𝑖 (𝐴𝑖 +Ak-i)
𝑖
10. Consider five wireless stations, A, B, C, D, and E. Station A can communicate with all other
stations. B can communicate with A, C and E, C can communicate with A, B and D. D can
communicate with A, C and E. E can communicate A, D and B.
(i) When A is sending to B, what other communications are possible?
(ii) When B is sending to A, what other communications are possible?
(iii) When B is sending to C, what other communications are possible?
11. Suppose the round-trip propagation delay for Ethernet is 46.4 μs. This yields a minimum packet
size of 512 bits (464 bits corresponding to propagation delay + 48 bits of jam signal).
(i) What happens to the minimum packet size if the delay time is held constant, and the signaling rate rises
to 100 Mbps?
(ii) What are the drawbacks to so large a minimum packet size?
(i) If compatibility were not an issue, how might the specifications be written so as to permit a
smaller minimum packet size?
12. Suppose Ethernet physical addresses are chosen at random (using true random bits).
(i) What is the probability that on a 1024-host network, two addresses will be the same?
(ii) What is the probability that the above event will occur on some one or more of 220 networks?
(iii) What is the probability that of the 230 hosts in all the networks of (b), some pair has the same
address?
13. Consider the following Ethernet model. Transmission attempts are at random times with an average spacing of
λ slot times; specifically, the interval between consecutive attempts is an exponential random variable X = −λ
log u, where u is chosen randomly in the interval 0 ≤ u ≤ 1. An attempt at time t results in a collision if there is
another attempt in the range from t − 1 to t + 1.