Exercises for Chapter 3:

Networking and Internetworking

From Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair

Distributed Systems:
Concepts and Design
Edition 5, © Addison-Wesley 2012
Exercise 3.1

A client sends a 200 byte request message to a service, which produces a response
containing 5000 bytes. Estimate the total time to complete the request in each of the
following cases, with the performance assumptions listed below:
i) Using connectionless
(datagram) communication (for example, UDP);
ii) Using connection-
oriented communication (for example, TCP);
iii) The server process is
in the same machine as the client.
[Latency per packet
(local or remote, incurred on both send and receive): 5 ms
Connection setup time (TCP only): 5 ms
Data transfer rate: 10 Mbps
MTU: 1000 bytes
Server request processing time: 2 ms
Assume that the network
Instructor’s is lightly
Guide for Coulouris, loaded.]
Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 3.2

The Internet is far too large for any router to hold

routing information for all destinations. How does the
Internet routing scheme deal with this issue?
pages 98, 114

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 3.3

What is the task of an Ethernet switch? What tables

does it maintain?
pages 105, 130

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 3.4

Make a table similar to Figure 3.5 describing the work

done by the software in each protocol layer when
Internet applications and the TCP/IP suite are
implemented over an Ethernet.
pages 94, 122, 130

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 3.5

How has the end-to-end argument [Saltzer et al.

1984] been applied to the design of the Internet?
Consider how the use of a virtual circuit network
protocol in place of IP would impact the feasibility of
the World Wide Web.
pages 61, 96, 106, [www.reed.com]

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 3.6

Can we be sure that no two computers in the Internet

have the same IP addresses?
page 108

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 3.7

Compare connectionless (UDP) and connection-oriented (TCP)

communication for the implementation of each of the following
application-level or presentation-level protocols:
i) virtual terminal access (for example, Telnet);
ii) file transfer (for example, FTP);
iii) user location (for example, rwho, finger);
iv) information browsing (for example, HTTP);
v) remote procedure call.
page 122

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 3.8

Explain how it is possible for a sequence of packets

transmitted through a wide area network to arrive at
their destination in an order that differs from that in
which they were sent. Why can’t this happen in a local
network? Can it happen in an ATM network?
pages 97, 131

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 3.9

A specific problem that must be solved in remote

terminal access protocols such as Telnet is the need to
transmit exceptional events such as ‘kill signals’ from
the ‘terminal’ to the host in advance of previously-
transmitted data. Kill signals should reach their
destination ahead of any other ongoing transmissions.
Discuss the solution of this problem with connection-
oriented and connectionless protocols.
page 122

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 3.10

What are the disadvantages of using network-level

broadcasting to locate resources:
i) in a single Ethernet?
ii) in an intranet?
To what extent is Ethernet multicast an
improvement on broadcasting?
page 130

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 3.11

Suggest a scheme that improves on MobileIP for

providing access to a web server on a mobile device
which is sometimes connected to the Internet by
mobile phone and at other times has a wired
connection to the Internet at one of several locations.
page 120

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 3.12

Show the sequence of changes to the routing tables in

Figure 3.8 that would occur (according to the RIP
algorithm given in Figure 3.9) after the link labelled 3 in
Figure 3.7 is broken.
pages 98–101

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 3.13

Use the diagram in Figure 3.13 as a basis for an

illustration showing the segmentation and
encapsulation of an HTTP request to a server and the
resulting reply. Assume that request is a short HTTP
message, but the reply includes at least 2000 bytes of
HTML.
page 93, 107

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 3.14

Consider the use of TCP in a Telnet remote terminal

client. How should the keyboard input be buffered at
the client? Investigate Nagle’s and Clark’s algorithms
[Nagle 1984, Clark 1982] for flow control and compare
them with the simple algorithm described on page 124
when TCP is used by
(a) a web server,
(b) a Telnet application,
(c) a remote graphical application with continuous
mouse input.
pages 102, 124
Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 3.15

Construct a network diagram similar to Figure 3.10 for

the local network at your institution or company.
page 104.

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 3.16

Describe how you would configure a firewall to protect

the local network at your institution or company. What
incoming and outgoing requests should it intercept?
page 125

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 3.17

How does a newly-installed personal computer

connected to an Ethernet discover the IP addresses of
local servers? How does it translate them to Ethernet
addresses?
page 111

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Exercise 3.18

Can firewalls prevent denial of service attacks such as

the one described on page 96? What other methods
are available to deal with such attacks?
page 112, 125

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012