Chapter 2

Data Communications Concepts

Data Digitization
 The process of process of transforming
humanly readable characters into
machine readable code is character
encoding.
 Characters are turned into a series of
ones and zeroes.
 The most commonly used standards are
ASCII, EBCDIC, and UNICODE
7-Bit ASCII Code table

•Ascii encoding is used on most computers today

EBCDIC Code Table

• EBCDIC is used on IBM Mainframes

Serial vs. Parallel Data Transmission
 Serial vs. parallel Data Transmission
Transmission Serial Parallel
Characteristic

Transmission Description One bit after another, one at a All bits in a single character
time transmitted simultaneously

Comparative Speed Slower Faster

Distance Limitation Farther Shorter

Application Between two computers, from Within a computer along the

computers to external devices, computer’s busses, between a
local and wide area networks drive controller and a hard drive

Cable Description All bits travel down a single wire, Each bit travels down its own
one bit at a time wire simultaneously with other
bits.
Synchronous vs. Asynchronous
transmission
 Modulation vs. demodulation

 This process is done by a mo(dulator)dem(odulator)

Modem based communication channels

 The dial-up modem allows connections through

the phone network
 Half vs. full duplex

 Data communications sessions are bi-

directional in nature.
 There are two environments available for
handling this bi-directional traffic: full and half
duplex.
 In a full duplex communications environment
both devices can transmit at the same time.
 In a half duplex environment you can only
hear or talk at any given point in time.
 Given the choice of full or half duplex it is
usually better to choose full duplex.
 Carrier Wave

 There are three properties of a wave that can

be modulated or altered:
 Amplitude
 Frequency
 Phase
 Amplitude Modulation

 Each vertical lines separates opportunities to identify a 1

or 0 from another.
 These timed opportunities are known as signaling events.
 The proper name for one signaling event is a baud
Frequency Modulation

 frequency shift keying or FSK

Phase Modulation

 phase shift keying or PSK

Detecting Phase Shifting

 Quadrature Phase Shift Keying

Increasing transmission efficiency

 There are two ways in which a given

modem can transmit data faster:
  increase the signaling events per second,
or baud rate.
 find a way for the modem to interpret more
than one bit per baud.
Differential Quadrature Phase Shift keying

 This technique improves transmission rate by

increasing the number of events per baud
 Data Compression

 Data compression techniques improve

throughput.
Data compression
 The sending device replaces strings of
repeating character patterns with a
special code that represents the pattern.
 The code is significantly smaller than
the pattern it represents.
 This results in the amount of data sent
between the sending device and the
receiving device to increase.
Packetization
 The process of dividing the data steam
flowing between devices into structured
blocks known as packets.
 A packet is a group of bits organized in
a pre-determined, structured manner
consisting of a piece of the data stream
to which management information is
added.
 Packetization

 This data stream is divided into 3 packets

 Note the addition of header information to the data
portion
Packetization
 The predetermined structure of a
packet is critical.
 Through the use of standards, devices
know the number of bits in each
section; the header, data portion and
trailer.
Encapsulation / De-encapsulation
 In a layered protocol, each layer adds a
header according to the layer’s syntax.
 The sending device adds this
information in a process of
encapsulation
 The receiving device reverses the this
process (de-encapsulation)
Encapsulation / De-encapsulation in the OSI model
Multiplexing
Frequency Division Multiplexing
Time Division Multiplexing
Statistical Time Division
Multiplexing
 Switching

 Switching allows temporary connections to be

established, maintained and terminated between
sources and destinations
Circuit Switching
 The work to create a signal path is done up
front; a switch fabric creates a direct path
between the source and the destination.
 Communication takes place just as if the
temporary circuit were a permanent direct
connection:
 The switched dedicated circuit makes it
appear to the user of the circuit as if a wire
has been run directly between the
communicating devices.
Packet switching
 In a packet switched network, packets of
data travel one at a time from the message
source to the message destination.
 The physical path taken by one packet may be
different than that taken by other packets in
the data stream.
 The path is unknown to the end user.
 A series of packet switches pass packets
among themselves as they travel from source
to destination
Datagram Delivery
Connectionless vs. Connection-Oriented
Networks
The error detection process
Error detection process
 ·The transmitting and receiving devices agree on how
the error check is to be calculated
 · The transmitting device calculates and transmits the
error check along with the transmitted data
 · The receiving device re-calculates the error check
based on the received data and compares its newly
calculated error check to the error check received
with the data
 ·If the two error checks match, everything is fine. If
they do not match, an error has occurred
Parity Checking

 Simple parity checking

Parity Checking

 Parity checks can miss multiple bit

errors
Alternatives to parity

 LRC improves parity checking at the cost of extra data

transmitted
Error Control Techniques
 Error Prevention
 Error Detection
Error detection techniques
 Parity (VRC)
 Longitudinal Redundancy Checks (LRC)
 Checksums
 Cyclic Redundancy Checks (CRC)
Parity

 Parity, also known as a (Vertical

Redundancy Check or VRC), is the
simplest error detection technique.
 Parity works by adding an error check
bit to each character.
Longitudinal Redundancy
Checks

 Longitudinal Redundancy Checks

(LRC) seek to overcome the weakness
of simple, bit-oriented one directional
parity checking..
 LRC adds a second dimension to parity.
Checksums
 Checksums are also block-oriented error detection
characters added to a block of data characters.
 a checksum is calculated by adding the decimal face
values of all of the characters sent in a given data
block and sending only the least significant byte of
that sum.
 The receiving modem generates its own checksum
and compares the locally calculated checksum with
the transmitted checksum
Error Correction
 The receiving device detects the error
and requests a re-transmission
 The sending device then retransmits the
the portion that contained the error.
Flow Control
 To prevent buffer overflows the receiving
device sends a signal to the sending device
 The flow control software constantly monitors
the amount of free space available in buffer
memory and tells the sending device to stop
sending data when there is insufficient
storage space.
 When the buffer once again has room the
sending device is told to resume transmitting
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