Introduction to Data Communication

Introduction to Computer Networks

PLY 15.1
Nalaka Dissanayake
 Tele vs Data

 The term Telecommunication,

 which includes telephony, telegraphy, and
television,
 means communication at distance.
 tele is Greek for far.

 The word data refer to

 facts, concepts and instruction
 presented in whatever form is agreed upon by the parties
creating and using the data.

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Effectiveness of Data communications
 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.

 Accuracy
 The system must deliver the data accurately. Data
have been altered in transmission and left
uncorrected are unusable.

 Timeliness
 The system must deliver data in a timely manner.
Data delivered late are useless.
 In the case of video, audio and voice data,
timely delivery means delivery 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.

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 Components
 A data communication system has five components:
 Message: is the information (data) to be communicated. It
can consist of text, numbers, pictures, sounds, or video, or
any combination of these.
 Sender: is the device that sends the data message. It can
be a computer, workstation, telephone handset, video
camera, and so on.
 Receiver: is the device that receives the message. It can be
a computer, workstation, telephone handset, television and
so on.
 Transmission Medium: is the physical path by which a
message travels from sender to receiver. It could be a
twisted-pair wire, coaxial cable, fiber-optic cable, laser, or
radio waves
 Protocol: is a set of rules that governs data
communications. It represents an agreement between the
communicating devices. Without a protocol, two devices
may be connected but not communicating.

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Data communications system components

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 A network is a set of devices (often referred
to as nodes) connected by media links.
A node can be a computer, printer, or any other
device capable of sending and/or receiving data
generated by other nodes on the network.
 The links connecting the devices are often called
communication channels.
Most networks use distributed processing,
in which a task is divided among multiple computers.
Instead of a single large machine being responsible
for all aspects of a process, separate computers
(usually a personal computer or workstation)
handle a subset
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Network Criteria

 A network must be able to meet a

certain number of criteria:

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Networking Devices
Network Topology
Types of networks

 Today when we speak of networks, we

are generally referring to three primary
categories:
 Local area networks (LANs)
 Metropolitan area networks (MANs)
 Wide area networks (WANs)
 The category a network falls into is determined
by its size, its ownership, the distance it covers,
physical architecture.

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Local Area Network (LAN)

 A local area network is usually privately

owned and links the devices in a single
office, building, or campus.

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 Metropolitan Area Network (MAN)

 A metropolitan area network is designed to extend over an entire

city.
 It may be a single network such as cable television network,
or it may be a means of connecting a number of LANs into a
larger network so that resources may be shared LAN-to-LAN
as well as device-to-device.

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Wide Area Network (WAN)

 A wide area network provides

 long-distance transmission of data, voice, image, and video
information over large geographical area that may comprise
a country, a continent, or even the whole world.

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Data Networks
Importance of Bandwidth

Bandwidth Measurements
 Signal Impairments

 When an electrical signal is sent through a channel,

then three bad things can happen to it:
 Attenuation: power is lost, the signal gets weaker

 Distortion: The waveform of the signal is altered

 Noise: An unwanted signal is superimposed on

our wanted signal.
Typical unwanted signals are:
 Random background noise - commonly
from a natural source
 Someone else’s signal which has leaked into our signal
(crosstalk)
 Sine Wave
 s(t) = At sin(2  ft t + t)
 signal parameters of periodic signals:
sine wave as special periodic signal for a carrier:

 Peak Amplitude (A)

 maximum strength of signal
 volts
 Frequency (f)
 Rate of change of signal
 Hertz (Hz) or cycles per second
 Period = time for one repetition (T)
 T = 1/f
 Phase ()
 Relative position in time
s(t) = At sin(2  ft t + t)
Addition of Frequency Components
 Fourier analysis

 French mathematician Fourier showed any waveform

(provided it doesn’t have gaps or infinities) is equivalent to
some combination of sine waves with differing
amplitudes, frequencies and phases.

 He provided a mathematical way of computing these

parameters for a given waveform.
 To understand how a channel affects a digital signal,
we need to think in terms of sine waves.
Lecture 6-20/34
 Fourier representation of periodic signals

 
1
g (t )  c   an sin( 2nft)   bn cos( 2nft)
2 n 1 n 1

1 1

0 0
t t
ideal periodic signal real composition
(based on harmonics)
 Frequency Domain Concepts

 Signal usually made up of many frequencies

 Components are sine waves
 Can be shown (Fourier analysis) that any signal is
made up of component sine waves
 Can plot frequency domain functions
 Bandwidth of a signal
 So any signal (including digital signals) are
equivalent to a set of sine waves.
 The range of frequencies at which the signal
has sine-wave components of significant
amplitudes is termed the bandwidth of the
signal.
Amplitude

Bandwidth of the signal Frequency

Lecture 6-23/34
 Data Rate and Bandwidth

 Any transmission system has a limited band of

frequencies (Sinusoidal)
 This limits the data rate that can be carried
 Bandwidth of a channel
 A channel (e.g. a phone line) has a range of
frequencies it can transmit without
attenuation
 but signals outside that range are attenuated
 The range of frequencies transmitted is called
the bandwidth of the channel
Gain
1

Frequency
Bandwidth of the channel

Signals such as radio transmissions are divided into frequency “bands”.

 Bandwidth of Signals & Channels

 For a signal to pass successfully through a channel, the

bandwidth of the signal must fall within the bandwidth
of the channel.
 Otherwise components of the original signal will be removed
causing distortion which may be unacceptable
Amplitude

Gain Bandwidth of the signal Frequency

Frequency
Bandwidth of the channel
Acoustic Spectrum (Analog)
 Signals

 Means by which data are propagated

 Analog
 Continuously variable
 Various media
 wire, fiber optic, space
 Speech bandwidth 100Hz to 7kHz
 Telephone bandwidth 300Hz to 3400Hz
 Video bandwidth 4MHz
 Digital
 Use two DC components
 Shannon's Theorem

Shannon's Theorem gives an upper bound to the capacity of a link, in bits per
second (bps), as a function of the available bandwidth and the signal-to-noise
ratio of the link. The Theorem can be stated as:

C = B * log2(1+ S/N)

where C is the achievable channel capacity, B is the bandwidth of the line, S

is the average signal power and N is the average noise power.

The signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) is usually expressed in decibels (dB) given by

the formula:
10 * log10(S/N)

so for example a signal-to-noise ratio of 1000 is commonly expressed as

10 * log10(1000) = 30 dB.
Bits and Bytes
Hexadecimal
Converting Decimal numbers to 8-bit Binary
Numbers
 internet vs Internet

 The term internet (lowercase i)

 It is a generic term used to mean an
interconnection of networks.
 The term Internet (uppercase I)
 It is the name of specific worldwide network.

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 Protocol

 A Protocol is a set of rules that

governs data communications.
 A protocol defines
 what is communicated,
 how it is communicated,
 when its communicated.

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Standards

 Data communications standards fall into

two categories:
 De facto: meaning by fact or by convention
are those that have not been approved by an
organized body but have been adopted as
standards through widespread use.
Ex. Wi-Fi
 De jure: meaning by law or by regulation
are those have been legislated by an officially
recognized body.
Ex. IEEE 802.3

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 Standard Organization

 ISO: International Organization for Standardization (www.iso.ch)

 ITU-T: International Telecommunications Union –Telecom Group
(www.itu.int)
 ANSI: American National Standards Institute (www.ansi.org)
 IEEE: Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
(www.ieee.org)
 IETF: Internet Engineering Task Force (www.ietf.org)
 IETF operates through a series of working groups. The
Requests for Comment (RFCs) that form the basis for
Internet standards are developed by IETF and its working
groups.

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 Layered Approach
Tasks involved in sending a letter

We use the concept of layers in our daily life. As an example,

let us consider two friends who communicate through postal
mail. The process of sending a letter to a friend would be
complex if there were no services available from the post
office.
Basic Routing
 Data Encapsulation HTTP req
Application Layer

Transport Layer TCP Header TCP data

Port numbers
Network Layer
IP Header IP Data Area
IP addresses
Data Link Layer
Frame Header Frame Data Area
MAC addresses

Frame Header IP Header TCP Header TCP data

Physical Layer What actually travels across the network?

1100010101110000100001111001010001110000101101100111110001010
Hop-to-Hop Delivery

 The physical
addresses will
change from
hop to hop

 But the logical

addresses
usually remain
the same.
 OSI Layer 7 Model
Established in 1947, the International Standards Organization
(ISO) is a multinational body dedicated to worldwide
agreement on international standards. An ISO standard that
covers all aspects of network communications is the Open
Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. It was first introduced
in the late 1970s.
Seven layers of the OSI model

ISO is the organization.

OSI is the model.
Summary of layer functions
 Comparison

 Why did TCP/IP

become the chosen
architecture?

 TCP/IP protocols were

mature and well tested

 OSI is unnecessarily
complex
 Summary of layer functions
• The physical layer is responsible for movements of
individual bits from one hop (node) to the next.
• The data link layer is responsible for moving frames
from one hop (node) to the next.
• The network layer is responsible for the delivery of individual
packets from the source host to the destination host.
• The transport layer is responsible for the delivery of a
message (segments) from one process to another.
• The presentation layer is responsible for translation,
compression, and encryption.
• The session layer is responsible for dialog control and
synchronization.
• The application layer is responsible for providing services to
the user.
The interaction between layers in the OSI model
 HTTP
Application Application
Application Application
layer layer

HTTP
Socket SYN Socket
port 2341 ACK 80
ACK
TCP
Transport TCP
Transport
TCP Seg
TCP Seg
TCP Seg
Internet
IP IP packet Internet IP packet Internet
IP
IP packet IP packet
Routing Table Frame
Network Network Network
Datalink
Datalink Frame Access
MAC LayerAccess Frame Access
Layer
Frame
address

User’s PC Router Web server

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