 Design Issues

 Routing Algorithms
 Congestion Control
 Quality of Service
 Internetworking
 Network Layer of the Internet
Source to destination delivery of individual packets
across multiple links
Getting to the destination may require making many
hops at intermediate routers along the way
To achieve its goals, the network layer must know
about the topology of the network (i.e., the set of all
routers and links) and choose appropriate paths
through it, even for large networks
It must also take care when choosing routes to avoid
overloading some of the communication lines and
routers while leaving others idle.
Deal with problems that arise when source and
destination are in different networks due to
differnces
Store-and-forward packet switching
Connectionless service – datagrams
Connection-oriented service – virtual circuits
Comparison of virtual-circuits and datagrams
Individual packets sent by hosts are forwarded by routers

The environment of the network layer protocols.

Packet is forwarded using destination address inside it
Different packets may take different paths
The algorithm that manages the tables and makes the routing decisions is
called the routing algorithm

Routing within a datagram network.

Packet is forwarded along a virtual circuit using tag inside it
Virtual circuit (VC) is set up before actual communication

Routing within a virtual-circuit network.

 The main function of the network layer is routing
packets from the source machine to the destination
machine.
 The algorithms that choose the routes and the data
structures that they use are a major area of network
layer design.
 The routing algorithm is that part of the network
layer software responsible for deciding which output
line an incoming packet should be transmitted on.
 Datagram subnet - decision must be made anew for
every arriving data packet since the best route may
have changed since last time.
 Virtual circuit subnet - routing decisions are
made only when a new virtual circuit is being set
up. Thereafter, data packets just follow the
already established route.
think of a router as having two processes inside it.
 One of them handles each packet as it arrives, looking up
the outgoing line to use for it in the routing tables. This
process is forwarding.
 The other process is responsible for filling in and updating
the routing tables. That is where the routing algorithm
comes into play.
certain properties are desirable in a routing
algorithm:
 correctness
 simplicity
 robustness
 stability
 Fairness ( Minimize mean packet delay )
 Efficiency ( Maximize total network
throughput )
 Routing algorithms grouped into two major classes: nonadaptive and
adaptive
 Non-adaptive algorithms
 do not base their routing decisions on any measurements or
estimates of the current topology and traffic.
 Instead, the choice of the route to use to get from I to J (for all I
and J) is computed in advance, offline, and downloaded to the
routers when the network is booted.
 This procedure is sometimes called static routing.
 Adaptive algorithms
 in contrast, change their routing decisions to reflect changes in
the topology, and sometimes changes in the traffic as well.
 These dynamic routing algorithms differ in
 where they get their information (e.g., locally, from adjacent
routers, or from all routers),
 when they change the routes (e.g., when the topology
changes, or every ΔT seconds as the load changes), and
 what metric is used for optimization (e.g., distance, number
of hops, or estimated transit time).
one can make a general statement about optimal
routes without regard to network topology or
traffic. This statement is known as the optimality
principle
It states that – “if router J is on the optimal path
from router I to router K, then the optimal
path from J to K also falls along the same
route”.
As a direct consequence of the optimality
principle, we can see that the set of optimal
routes from all sources to a given destination
form a tree rooted at the destination. Such a tree
is called a sink tree/minimum cost spanning tree
The goal of all routing algorithms is to discover
and use the sink trees for all routers.
sink tree is not necessarily unique
If we allow all of the possible paths to be chosen, the tree becomes a
more general structure called a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph).
Sink tree does not have loops

(a) A network. (b) A sink tree for router B.

Static RA

 The idea is to build a graph of the network, where each

node of the graph represents a router and each edge
represents a communication line, or link.
 To choose a route between a given pair of routers, the
algorithm just finds the shortest path between them on
the graph.
 Concept of a shortest path
 One way of measuring path length is the number of hops.
Using
this metric, the paths ABC and ABE in above figure are
equally long.
 Another metric is the geographic distance in kilometers, in which
case ABC is clearly much longer than ABE
 the labels on the edges could be computed as a function of the
distance, bandwidth, average traffic, communication cost,
measured delay, and other factors.
 By changing the weighting function, the algorithm would then
compute the „„shortest‟‟ path measured according to any one
of a number of criteria or to a combination of criteria.
The first six steps used in computing the shortest path from
A to D. The arrows indicate the working node.
Static RA

 In flooding every incoming packet is sent out on

every outgoing line except the one it arrived on
 generates vast numbers of duplicate packets
(infinite),
 Some measures to damp the process
 One measure is to have a hop counter in the header
that is decremented at each hop, with the packet
discarded when the counter reaches zero
 better technique is to have routers keep track of
which packets have been flooded to avoid sending
them for the second time.
 The Sequence Number Controlled Flooding (SNCF)
uses the sequence number to control the flooding of
the packets.
 Each packet in the transmission is assigned a
sequence number.
 Each router will maintain the details of the IP address
of the source host, and the sequence number of the
 First - ensures that a packet is delivered to every
node in the network
 Second - flooding is tremendously robust
 if large numbers of routers are blown to bits (e.g., in a
military network located in a war zone), flooding will find
a path if one exists, to get a packet to its destination
 Third - requires little setup.
 The routers only need to know their neighbors
 Fourth - can be used as a metric against which
other routing algorithms can be compared
 Flooding always chooses the shortest path because it
chooses every possible path in parallel
 Consequently, no other algorithm can produce a shorter
delay
Dynamic RA

This algorithm operates by having each router maintain a

table (i.e., a vector) giving the best known distance to each
destination and which link to use to get there.
WHERE - tables updated by exchanging information with
neighbours
Also called Bellman-Ford routing algorithm
Here each router maintains a routing table indexed by, and
containing one entry for each router in the network. This entry
has two parts:
 the preferred outgoing line to use for that destination
 and an estimate of the distance to that destination.
router is assumed to know ‘distance’ to each of its
neighbours
 If the metric is hops, the distance is just one hop.
 If the metric is propagation delay, the router can measure
it directly with special ECHO packets
 assume that delay is used as a metric and that the router knows
the delay to each of its neighbors
 Once every T msec, each router sends to each neighbor a list
of its estimated delays to each destination
 It also receives a similar list from each neighbor
 If router knows that delay to X is m msec, and also knows
that it can reach router i via X in Xi + m msec
 Fig shows the delay vectors received from neighbors of router J.
 A claims to have a 12-msec delay to B, a 25-msec delay to C,
a 40-msec delay to D, etc.
 Suppose J has measured its delay to its neighbors, A, I, H,
and K,
as 8, 10, 12, and 6 msec, respectively.
 Consider how J computes its new route to router G.
 It knows that it can get to A in 8 msec, and furthermore A claims to be
able to get to G in 18 msec, so J knows it can count on a delay of 26
msec to G if it forwards packets bound for G to A
 Similarly, it computes the delay to G via other paths and then
selects the minimum
(a)A network. (b)Input from A, I, H, K, and the
new routing table for J.
 The settling of routes to best paths across the network is called
convergence.
 DVR has a serious drawback in practice: it may converge to the
correct answer slowly. In particular, it reacts rapidly to good
news, but leisurely to bad news.
 The core of the problem is that when X tells Y that it has a path
some- where, Y has no way of knowing whether it itself is on the
path.

The count-to-infinity problem.

 Variants of link state routing called IS-IS and OSPF are
the routing algorithms that are most widely used
inside large networks and the Internet today.
 The idea behind link state routing is fairly simple
and can be stated as five parts. Each router must do
the following things to make it work:
1) Discover its neighbors and learn their network addresses
2) Find the cost metric to each of its neighbors
3) Construct a packet with all it has just learned
4) Send this packet to and receive packets from all other
routers
5) Compute the shortest path to every other router
 In effect, the complete topology is distributed to
every router. Then Dijkstra‟s algorithm can be run at
each router to find the shortest path to every other
router.
 Learning about the neighbors
 send a special HELLO packet on each point-to-point line
 When there are multiple routers on the same LAN then - One
designated router on the LAN is selected to play the role of N in
the routing protocol

(a) Nine routers and a broadcast LAN. (b) A graph model of

(a).
Setting Link Costs
 Suppose delay is used as the metric – can be measured by sending
special ECHO packet
Building Link State Packets
 Building the link state packets is easy. The hard part is
determining when to build them.
 One possibility is periodically, that is, at regular
intervals.
 Another possibility is when some significant event
occurs

(a) A network. (b) The link state packets for this network.
 Distributing the Link State Packets
 trickiest part of the algorithm is distributing the link state
packets
 All routers must get all the link state packets quickly and
reliably
 If different routers are using different versions of the topology,
the routes they compute can have inconsistencies such as
loops, unreachable machines, and other problems.
 use flooding to distribute link state packets to all routers
 To keep flood in check, each packet contains a sequence
number
 Routers keep track of all the (source router, sequence) pairs
seen
 When a new link state packet comes in, it is checked against
the list of packets already seen. If it is new, it is forwarded on
all lines except the one it arrived on. If it is a duplicate, it is
discarded.
 If a packet with a sequence number lower than the highest
one seen so far ever arrives, it is rejected as being obsolete
as the router has more recent data.
 above method has a few problems which are managed
 First, what if the sequence numbers wrap around ?
 The solution here is to use a 32-bit sequence number.
With one link state packet per second, it would take 137
years to wrap around
 Second, if a router ever crashes, it will lose track of its
sequence number. If it starts again at 0, the next packet it
sends will be rejected as a duplicate.
 Third, if a sequence number is ever corrupted and 65,540
is received instead of 4 (a 1-bit error), packets 5 through
65,540 will be rejected as obsolete, since the current
sequence number will be thought to be 65,540.
 The solution to all these problems is to include the age of
each packet and decrement it once per second. When the
age hits zero, the information from that router regarding
the packet is discarded.
 Computing the New Routes
 Once a router has accumulated a full set of link state
packets, it can construct the entire network graph
because every link is represented.
 Now Dijkstra‟s algorithm can be run locally to
construct
the shortest paths to all possible destinations

 Compared to distance vector routing, link state

routing requires more memory and computation

 Link state routing is widely used in actual

networks
 IS-IS (Intermediate System-Intermediate
System)
The packet buffer for router B in Fig. 5-12(a).
 When the load on a network(or a part of it) is
greater that the capacity(resources can handle) then
it leads to packet delays or loss, resulting in
performance degradation.
 This phenomena is called congestion.
 The network and transport layers share the
responsibility for handling congestion.
 Since congestion occurs within the network, it is the
network layer that directly experiences it and must
ultimately determine what to do with the excess
packets.
 However, the most effective way to control
congestion is to reduce the load that the transport
layer is placing on the network.
 This requires the network and transport layers to
work together.
With too much traffic, performance drops sharply.
 Causes of Congestion :
 Low-bandwidth links
 Slow processing routers
 Insufficient memory
 Bursty traffic ( 4-5 input lines – only one output line )
 Congestion control has to do with making sure the
network is able to carry the offered traffic. It is a global
issue, involving the behavior of all the hosts and routers.
 Flow control, in contrast, relates to the traffic between a
particular sender and a particular receiver. Its job is to
make sure that a fast sender cannot continually transmit
data faster than the receiver is able to absorb it.
 The reason congestion control and flow control are often
confused is that the best way to handle both problems
is to get the host to slow down
 The presence of congestion means that the load is
(temporarily) greater than the resources (in a part of the
network) can handle. Two solutions come to mind:
increase the resources or decrease the load
 Solutions are usually applied on different time scales to either
prevent congestion or react to it once it has occurred

Timescales of approaches to congestion control.

 It is a preventive congestion control technique
that focuses on adding resources dynamically
whenever signs of congestion are seen in the
network.
 resources are added dynamically, for example,
 turning on spare routers or
 enabling lines that are normally used only
as backups (to make the system fault
tolerant) or
 purchasing bandwidth on the open market.
 heavily utilized links and routers are upgraded at
the earliest opportunity.
 This is called provisioning and happens on a
long-term traffic trends.
1. The goal of traffic aware routing is to shift away traffic from
hotspots because that would be the first places in the network
to experience congestion.
2. But take load into account when computing routes cause
problems :
1. As a result the routing tables may oscillate widely, leading
to erratic routing and many potential problems.
3. Two techniques can contribute for successful solution, which
are as follows :
1. Multipath routing
2. The routing scheme to shift traffic across routes slowly
enough that it is able to converge
4. Given these difficulties, in the Internet routing protocols do
not generally adjust their routes depending on the load.
Instead, adjustments are made outside the routing protocol by
slowly changing its inputs. This is called traffic engineering.
 Sometimes not possible to increase capacity -The
only way then to beat back the congestion is to
decrease the load.
 In a VC network, new connections can be refused
if they would cause the network to become
congested. This is called admission control.
 When a new virtual circuit will lead to
congestion?
 This question arises because , virtual
circuits in computer networks come in all
shapes and sizes.
 And the traffic associated with the virtual
circuit also must have its own
characteristics.
• Traffic is often described in terms of its rate and
shape – (Leaky bucket or Token bucket)
• Armed with traffic descriptions, the network can
decide whether to admit the new virtual circuit.
 When congestion is imminent, network must tell the
senders to throttle back their transmissions and slow
down
 Two difficulties with this approach are how to identify
the onset of congestion, and how to inform the
source that needs to slow down.
 To tackle the first issue, routers can monitor the
average load, queueing delay, or packet loss.
 In all cases, rising numbers indicate growing
congestion.
 To tackle the second issue, routers must
participate
in a feedback loop with the sources.
 Choke packet (Source Quench packet)
 Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)
 Hop-by-Hop Back pressure/choke packet
• Choke packet (Source Quench packet)
• The most direct way to notify a sender of congestion is
to tell it directly.
• In this approach, the router selects a congested
packet and sends a choke packet back to the source
host, giving it the destination found in the packet.
• Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)
• Instead of generating additional packets to warn of
congestion, a router can tag any packet it forwards (by
setting a bit in the packet’s header) to signal that it is
experiencing congestion.
• When the network delivers the packet, the destination
can note that there is congestion and inform the
sender when it sends a reply packet.
• The sender can then throttle its transmissions as
before.
• Hop-by-Hop Backpressure
• At high speeds or over long distances, many new
packets may be transmitted after congestion has
been signalled because of the delay before the
signal takes effect.
• The approach is to have the choke packet take
effect at every hop it passes through .
• The net effect of this hop-by-hop scheme is to
provide quick relief at the point of congestion, at
the price of using up more buffers upstream.
 Load shedding - when routers cannot handle the number of
incoming packets, they just throw them away.

 key question is which packets to drop?

 preferred choice may depend on the type of applications

 For a file transfer, an old packet is worth more than a new one.
This is because dropping packet 6 and keeping packets 7 through
10, for example, will only force the receiver to do more work to
buffer data that it cannot yet use.
 For real-time media, a new packet is worth more than an old one -
because packets become useless if they are delayed and miss the
time at which they must be played out to the user.
 The former policy (old is better than new) is often called wine and
the latter (new is better than old) is often called milk
 More intelligent load shedding requires cooperation from the senders.
 An example is packets that carry routing information. These
packets are more important than regular data packets because
they establish routes;
 To implement an intelligent discard policy, applications must mark
their packets to indicate to the network how important they are
 Dealing with congestion when it first starts is
more effective than letting it choke up the
network and then trying to deal with it
 Routers must discard packets before all the
buffer space is exhausted.
 A reliable indication of congestion - is packet
loss
 By having routers drop packets early, before the
situation has become hopeless, there is time for
the source to take action before it is too late
 A popular algorithm for doing this is called RED
(Random Early Detection)
 To determine when to start discarding, routers
maintain a running average of their queue lengths.
When the average queue length on some link
exceeds a threshold, the link is said to be
congested and a small fraction of the packets are
dropped at random.
• Picking packets at random makes it more likely that
the fastest senders will see a packet drop .
• The affected sender will notice the loss when there is
no acknowledgement, and then the transport
protocol will slow down.
• The lost packet is thus delivering the same message
as a choke packet, but implicitly, without the router
sending any explicit signal.
• ECN is the preferred option if it is available. It works
in exactly the same manner, but delivers a
congestion signal explicitly rather than as a loss.
• RED is used when hosts cannot receive explicit
signals.
 techniques we looked at in the previous sections are designed to
reduce congestion and improve network performance
 However, there are applications (and customers) that demand
stronger performance guarantees from the network
 Multimedia applications in particular, often need a minimum
throughput and maximum latency to work.
 Now we study network performance, with focus on ways to
provide quality of service that is matched to application needs.
 This is an area in which the Internet is undergoing a long-term
upgrade.
 An easy solution to provide good quality of service is to build a
network with enough capacity for whatever traffic will be thrown
at it. The name for this solution is overprovisioning.
 The trouble with this solution is that it is expensive
 Quality of service mechanisms let a network with less capacity
meet application requirements just as well at a lower cost
 Four issues must be addressed to ensure quality of
service:
1) What applications need from the network.
2) How to regulate the traffic that enters the network.
3) How to reserve resources at routers to guarantee
performance.
4) Whether the network can safely accept more
traffic.

 No single technique deals efficiently with all these

issues
 Instead, a variety of techniques have been
developed
for use at the network (and transport) layer.
 Practical quality-of-service solutions combine
multiple techniques.
 two versions of quality of service for the Internet -
Integrated Services and Differentiated Services
 A stream of packets from a source to a destination is called a flow
 needs of each flow can be characterized by four primary parameters
: bandwidth, delay, jitter (variation in the delay or packet arrival
times), and loss.
 Together, they determine the Quality of Service the flow
requires.
 Before the network can make QoS guarantees, it must know what
traffic is being guaranteed
 Traffic shaping is a technique for regulating the average rate and
burstiness of a flow of data that enters the network
 When a flow is set up, the user and the network agree on a
certain traffic pattern (i.e., shape) for that flow. In effect, the
customer says to the provider „„My transmission pattern will look
like this; can you handle it?‟‟
 This agreement is called an SLA (Service Level Agreement),
especially when it is made over aggregate flows and long periods
of time, such as all of the traffic for a given customer.
 As long as the customer only sends packets according to the
agreed-on contract, the provider promises to deliver them all in
a timely fashion.
 Monitoring a traffic flow ( to check if the customer is
following the agreement) is called traffic policing.
 Leaky and Token Bucket Algorithms – two of the more
general ways to characterize traffic
 to provide a performance guarantee, we must
reserve sufficient resources along the route that
the packets take through the network

 Algorithms that allocate router resources among

the packets of a flow and between competing flows
are called packet scheduling algorithms.

 Three different kinds of resources can potentially

be reserved for different flows:
1. Bandwidth
2. Buffer space
3. CPU cycles
 The user offers a flow with an accompanying QoS requirement to
the network. The network then decides whether to accept or
reject the flow based on its capacity and the commitments it has
made to other flows.
 If it accepts, the network reserves capacity in advance at routers
to guarantee QoS when traffic is sent on the new flow.
 reservations must be made at all the routers along the route
 Many times QoS guarantees for new flows are accommodated by
choosing a different route for the flow which has excess capacity
(not the optimal one) . This is called QoS routing.
 the decision to accept or reject a flow is not a simple matter of
comparing the resources (bandwidth, buffers, cycles) requested
by the flow with the router‟s excess capacity in those three
dimensions. It is a little more complicated
 Because many parties may be involved in the flow negotiation
(the sender, the receiver, and all the routers along the path),
flows must be described accurately in terms of specific
parameters that can be negotiated. A set of such parameters is
called a flow specification.
 Typically, the sender (e.g., a video server) produces a flow
specification proposing the parameters it would like to use.
 As the specification propagates along the route, each router
examines it and modifies the parameters as need be.
 The modifications can only reduce the flow, not increase it (e.g.,
a lower data rate, not a higher one).
 When it gets to the other end, the parameters can be
established.
 Eg. Flow specification parameters -Token bucket rate
(Bytes/sec), Token bucket size (Bytes), Peak data rate
(Bytes/sec), Minimum packet size (Bytes), Maximum packet size
(Bytes)
 Item Some Possibilities
Service offered Connectionless versus connection oriented
Addressing Different sizes, flat or hierarchical
Broadcasting Present or absent (also multicast)
Packet size Every network has its own maximum
Ordering Ordered and unordered delivery
Quality of service Present or absent; many different kinds
Reliability Different levels of loss
Security Privacy rules, encryption, etc.
Parameters Different timeouts, flow specifications, etc.
Accounting By connect time, packet, byte, or not at all

Some of the many ways networks can differ.

(a) A packet crossing different networks. (b) Network and
link layer protocol processing.
Tunneling a packet from Paris to London.
 Since each network in the Internet is operated independently
of the others, it is often referred to as an AS (Autonomous
System)
 Routing in the internet is more complicated
 Leads to a two-level routing algorithm
 Within each network, an intradomain or interior gateway protocol is used
 Across the networks that make up the internet, an interdomain or exterior
gateway protocol is used.
 The networks may all use different intradomain protocols, but
they must use the same interdomain protocol
 In the Internet, the interdomain routing protocol used is called
BGP (Border Gateway Protocol).
 In the Internet, nontechnical factors - in the form of a routing
policy govern the way autonomous networks select the
routes that they use.
 business arrangements between ISPs
 if internetwork routing requires crossing international boundaries, various
laws may suddenly come into play
 Each network or link imposes some maximum size on
its packets
 Maximum payloads for some common technologies
are 1500 bytes for Ethernet and 2272 bytes for
802.11. IP allows for packets as big as 65,515
bytes.
 An obvious internetworking problem appears when a
large packet wants to travel through a network whose
maximum packet size is too small
 solution to the problem is to allow routers to break
up packets into fragments, sending each fragment as
a separate network layer packet.
 Two Strategies for packet fragmentation :
 Transparent Fragmentation
 Non-transparent Fragmentation
(a)Transparent fragmentation. (b)Nontransparent
fragmentation.
Transparent Fragmentation
Advantages
Drawbacks
◦ All packets have to follow same path

Non-Transparent Fragmentation
Advantages
Drawbacks
Fragmentation when the elementary data size is 1 byte. (a)Original packet,
containing 10 data bytes. (b)Fragments after passing through a network with
maximum packet size of 8 payload bytes plus header. (c)Fragments after passing
through a size 5 gateway.
the strategy used in the modern Internet – follows the original
solution of getting rid of fragmentation in the network. The
process is called path MTU discovery

Path MTU discovery.

The Internet is an interconnected collection of many
networks.
IPv4 datagram consists of a header part and payload part
header has a 20-byte fixed part and a variable-length optional part
Maximum length of Ip packet is 65,535 bytes.

The IPv4 (Internet Protocol) header.

 IP address actually refers to a network interface, so if a host is on two
networks, it must have two IP addresses
 routers have multiple interfaces and thus multiple IP addresses.
 IP addresses are hierarchical
 Each 32-bit address has – a variable-length network and a host
portion
 The network portion has the same value for all hosts on a single
network
 This means that a network corresponds to a contiguous block of IP address
space. This block is called a prefix

An IP prefix and a subnet mask.

 IP addresses are written in dotted decimal notation.
 In this format, each of the 4 bytes is written in decimal, from
0 to 255. For example, 172.24.0.1
 Prefixes are written by giving the lowest IP address in the
block and the size of the block.
 Since the prefix length cannot be inferred from the IP address
alone, routing protocols must carry the prefixes to routers.
 prefixes are simply described by their length, as in a „„/16‟‟
which is pronounced „„slash 16.‟‟ Eg. 172.24.11.123/16
 The length of the prefix corresponds to a binary mask of 1s
in the network portion. When written out this way, it is called
a subnet mask. It can be ANDed with the IP address to
extract only the network portion Eg. 255.255.0.0 in above
case
 Class A format allows for up to 128 networks with 16 million hosts each
 Class B - 16,384 networks with up to 65,536 hosts each,
 Class C - 2 million networks with up to 256 hosts each

IP address formats.
Special IP addresses.
 Network numbers are managed by a nonprofit corporation called
ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)
 In turn, ICANN delegates parts of the address space to various
regional authorities, which give out IP addresses to ISPs and other
companies.
 This is the process by which a company is allocated a block of IP
addresses
 Problem : University – CS Department - /16 addresses
 Few years later – EE Dept, Arts Dept want internet
 How to allocate – buy new addresses ?
 The solution is to allow the block of addresses to be split into
several parts for internal use as multiple networks, while still acting
like a single network to the outside world. This is called subnetting
and the networks (such as Ethernet LANs) that result from dividing
up a larger network are called subnets
Splitting an IP prefix into separate networks with subnetting.
 problem that remains: routing table explosion
 Routers in organizations at the edge of a network, such as a
university – few entries
 Routers in ISPs and backbones in the middle of the Internet –
millions of entries
 Goal - reduce routing table sizes
 Solution - we combine multiple small prefixes into a single
larger prefix. This process is called route aggregation. The
resulting larger prefix is sometimes called a supernet
 With aggregation, IP addresses are contained in prefixes of
varying sizes. The same IP add r ess that one router treats as
1 0
part of a /22 (a block containing 2 addresses) may be treat e d
1 2
by another router as part of a larger /20 (which contains 2
addresses). It is up to each router to have the corresponding
prefix information.
 This design works with subnetting and is called CIDR (Classless
Inter-Domain Routing),
University First address Last address How many Prefix
Cambridge 194.24.0.0 194.24.7.255 2048 194.24.0.0/21
Edinburgh 194.24.8.0 194.24.11.255 1024 194.24.8.0/22
(Available) 194.24.12.0 194.24.15.255 1024 194.24.12.0/22
Oxford 194.24.16.0 194.24.31.255 4096 194.24.16.0/20

A set of IP address assignments.

Aggregation of IP prefixes.
Longest matching prefix routing at the New York router.
 Conceptually, CIDR works as follows :
 When a packet comes in, the routing table is scanned to
determine if the destination lies within the prefix.
 It is possible that multiple entries with different prefix
lengths will match, in which case the entry with the
longest prefix is used.
 Thus, if there is a match for a /20 mask and a /24 mask,
the /24 entry is used to look up the outgoing line for
the packet.
 complex algorithms have been devised to speed
up the address matching process
 Commercial routers use custom VLSI chips with
these algorithms embedded in hardware.
 Problem : possibility of running out of IP addresses
 Long-term solution - IPv6, with 128-bit addresses
 Quick fix solution - NAT (Network Address Translation)
 The basic idea behind NAT is for the ISP to assign each customer a
single IP address for Internet traffic.
 Within the customer network, every computer gets a unique IP
address, which is used for routing intramural traffic.
 However, just before a packet exits the customer network and
goes to the ISP, an address translation from the unique internal IP
address to the shared public IP address takes place.
 This translation makes use of private IP addresses.
Networks may use them internally as they wish. The only
rule is that no packets containing these addresses may
appear on the Internet itself.
 The three reserved ranges are:
 10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255/8 (16,777,216 hosts)
 172.16.0.0 – 172.31.255.255/12 (1,048,576 hosts)
 192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255/16 (65,536 hosts)
Placement and operation of a NAT box.
 Major goals of IPv6 :

1. Support billions of hosts

2. Reduce the size of the routing tables.
3. Simplify the protocol, to allow routers to process
packets faster.
4. Provide better security (authentication and
privacy).
5. Pay more attention to the type of service, particularly
for real-time data.
6. Aid multicasting by allowing scopes to be specified.
7. Make it possible for a host to roam without changing
its address.
8. Allow the protocol to evolve in the future.
9. Permit the old and new protocols to coexist for
years.
 IPv6 has longer addresses - They are 128 bits long
providing an effectively unlimited supply of Internet
addresses
 A new notation for writing 16-byte addresses. They are written
as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits with colons
between the groups, like this:
 8000:0000:0000:0000:0123:4567:89AB:CDEF
 Simplification of the header - It contains only seven
fields (versus 13 in IPv4). This change allows routers to
process packets faster and thus improves throughput
and delay.
 better support for options
 big advance is in security – Authentication and privacy
are key features of the new IP
 More emphasis on Quality of service
The IPv6 fixed header (required).
Some of the missing IPv4 fields are occasionally still needed, so IPv6
introduces the concept of (optional) extension headers
Six kinds of extension headers are defined at present. Each one is
optional, but if more than one is present they must appear directly
after the fixed header, and preferably in the order listed

Extension header Description

Hop-by-hop options Miscellaneous information for routers
Destination options Additional information for the destination
Routing Loose list of routers to visit
Fragmentation Management of datagram fragments
Authentication Verification of the sender's identity
Encrypted security payload Information about the encrypted contents
The hop-by-hop extension header for large datagrams
(jumbograms).
 The operation of the Internet is monitored closely by the routers.
 When something unexpected occurs during packet processing at a router,
the event is reported to the sender by the ICMP
 ICMP is also used to test the Internet.

Message type Description

Destination unreachable Packet could not be delivered
Time exceeded Time to live field hit 0
Parameter problem Invalid header field
Source quench Choke packet
Redirect Teach a router about geography
Echo and echo reply Check if a machine is alive
Timestamp request/reply Same as Echo, but with timestamp
Router advertisement/solicitation Find a nearby router
 how do IP addresses get mapped onto data link
layer addresses, such as Ethernet?
 The protocol used for asking the question “who
owns IP address x.x.x.x” and getting the reply is
called ARP (Address Resolution Protocol).
 Almost every machine on the Internet runs it.
 The advantage of using ARP over configuration
files is the simplicity
 Various optimizations are possible to make ARP
work more efficiently
 Caching
 Gratious ARP
 Proxy ARP
Two switched Ethernet LANs joined by a router.
 When a computer is started, it has a built-in Ethernet or other
link layer address embedded in the NIC, but no IP address.
 DHCP is used to allocate ip addresses
 With DHCP, every network must have a DHCP server that is
responsible for configuration.
 Much like ARP, the computer broadcasts a request for an IP
address on its network. It does this by using a DHCP DISCOVER
packet.
 This packet must reach the DHCP server. If that server is not
directly attached to the network, the router will be configured to
receive DHCP broadcasts and relay them to the DHCP server,
wherever it is located.
 When the server receives the request, it allocates a free IP
address and sends it to the host in a DHCP OFFER packet (which
again may be relayed via the router).
 To be able to do this work even when hosts do not have IP
addresses, the server identifies a host using its Ethernet address
(which is carried in the DHCP DISCOVER packet)
An issue that arises with automatic assignment of IP addresses from a
pool is for how long an IP address should be allocated. If a host leaves
the network and does not return its IP address to the DHCP server, that
address will be permanently lost.
After a period of time, many addresses may be lost. To prevent
that from happening, IP address assignment may be for a fixed
period of time, a technique called leasing.
Just before the lease expires, the host must ask for a DHCP renewal. If it
fails to make a request or the request is denied, the host may no longer
use the IP address it was given earlier.
DHCP is widely used in the Internet to configure all sorts of parameters
in addition to providing hosts with IP addresses.
DHCP is used by ISPs to set the parameters of devices over the Internet
access link, so that customers do not need to phone their ISPs to get
this
information. Common examples of the information that is configured
include the network mask, the IP address of the default gateway, and the
IP addresses of DNS and time servers.
DHCP has largely replaced earlier protocols (called RARP and BOOTP)
with more limited functionality.