EIE 3333 Data and Computer Communications

Tutorial 7
Unit 7: Data Link Layer: LANs and Virtual LANs

Review Questions

1. What are the main topologies of LANs?

2. What are the roles of medium access control and logical link control in IEEE LAN
standards?
3. What is the difference between a unicast, multicast and broadcast address?
4. How can we distinguish between a unicast and multicast address in Ethernet?
5. Given an Ethernet address: 07:01:02:03:04:05, what is the type of the address (unicast,
multicast and broadcast)?
6. What are the functions of ARP?
7. How can we obtain the Ethernet address for a given IP address using ARP?
8. What is the difference between a hub and layer-2 switch?
9. What are the advantages of dividing an Ethernet LAN with a switch?
10. What is a virtual LAN?
11. What is the virtual LAN’s tag added by the switch?

Problems
1. An Ethernet MAC sublayer receives 1510 bytes of data from the upper layer. Can the
data be encapsulated in one frame? If not, how many frames need to be sent? What is the
size of the data in each frame?

2. A channel using random access protocols has three stations on a bus with end-to-end
propagation delay . Station A is located at one end of the bus, and stations B and C are
together located at the other end of the bus. Frames arrive at the three stations and are
ready to be transmitted at stations A, B, and C at the respective times tA = 0, tB = /2, and
tC = 3/2. Frames require transmission times of 4. In appropriate figures, with time as
the horizontal axis, show the transmission activity of each of the three stations for
a) ALOHA
b) Non-persistent CSMA
c) Non-persistent CSMA/CD

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3. In a Gigabit Ethernet LAN, the average size of a frame is 1000 bytes. If a noise of 2ms
occurs on the LAN, how many frames are destroyed?

4. A disadvantage of the contention approach for LANs, such as CSMA/CD, is the capacity
wasted due to multiple stations attempting to access the channel at the same time.
Suppose that time is divided into discrete slots, with each of 5 stations attempting to
transmit with probability 0.35 during each slot.

a. What fraction of slots is wasted due to multiple simultaneous transmission attempts?

b. Generalize the answer for N stations with probability p.

5. The binary exponential backoff algorithm is defined by IEEE 802 as follows:

The delay is an integral multiple of slot time. The number of slot times to delay before the
nth retransmission attempt is chosen as a uniformly distributed random integer r in the
range of 1  r 2K, where K = min(n,10).

Slot time is, roughly, twice the round-trip propagation delay. Assume that two stations
always have a frame to send. After a collision, what is the mean number of retransmission
attempts before one station successful retransmits?

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