CS 118 Winter 2015 : Homework 1

Instructions
Solve the following problems and submit your answers on a separate piece of paper. Show your work at all
times and answer short questions in brief sentences. Please put your name, student id and discussion section
number at the top right corner of your homework, like so:

last, first
123456789
Section 1A

Deadline
Thursday, January 15, 2015 at 5pm in BH2432, mailbox A14 (with CS118 label). No late submissions
allowed.

Problem 1
Suppose that two hosts, A and B, are 20,000 km apart and are connected by a direct link with a rate of 2
Mbps. Suppose the propagation speed over the link is 250,000 km/sec. Note that 1K = 1000, 1M = 1 106 ;
it might help to practice with Problem 6 first on your book.
a. What is the propagation delay dprop for this link in milliseconds (ms)?
b. Calculate the bandwidth-delay product, R dprop in bits.
c. Consider sending a file of 100 KB. Suppose that the file is sent continuously as one big message. What
is the maximum number of bits that will be in the link at any time?
d. In one sentence, what does the bandwidth-delay product represent based on your observations of your
answers in (b) and (c)?
e. For this question suppose that the transmission rate of the link is 1 Gbps. If we send the same 100 KB
file continuously as one large message, what is the maximum number of bits that will be in the link at
any time?
f. What can we conclude about the relationship between the maximum number of bits on a link and its
transmission rate?
g. How long does it take to completely send the 100 KB file in case (c) across the link?
h. If we now break up the same file into 4 KB packets, how long does it take to completely send the
file this time? Suppose that each packet must be acknowledged by the receiver and the size of the
acknowledgement packets is 20 bytes. Finally, assume that the sender cannot send a packet until the
preceding one is acknowledged.
i. Provide a short explanation of the results in (g) and (h).
j. Draw a network-time diagram of the first three packets sent between hosts A and B. Make sure you
label the transmission time in both hosts, the propagation delay, and the senders round-trip time
(RTT) on your diagram. You can find a good example on Pg. 102, Figure 2.7 in your book.

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CS 118 Winter 2015 : Homework 1

Problem 2
Suppose within your Web browser you click on a link to obtain a Web page. The IP address for the associated
URL is not cached in your local host, so a DNS look-up is necessary to obtain the IP address. Suppose that
your host must contact n DNS servers before receiving the needed IP address from DNS; the successive visits
incur RTTs of RT T1 , ..., RT Tn (dont worry about the details of how DNS works). Further suppose that
the Web page associated with the link is a small HTML file, consisting only of references to three very small
objects on the same server. Let RT T0 denote the RTT between the local host and the server containing the
object. Neglecting transmission times, how much time elapses (in terms of RT T0 , RT T1 , ..., RT Tn ) from
when you click on the link until your host receives all of the objects, if you are using:
a. Nonpersistent HTTP with no parallel TCP connections?
b. Nonpersistent HTTP with parallel connections?
c. Persistent HTTP with pipelining?

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