CHAPTER 4.

 
R2. We noted that network layer functionality can be broadly divided into data plane functionality
and control plane functionality. What are the main functions of the data plane? Of the control
plane?

R3. We made a distinction between the forwarding function and the routing function performed in the
network layer. What are the key differences between routing and forwarding?

R9.. Suppose that an arriving packet matches two or more entries in a router’s forwarding table.
With traditional destination-based forwarding, what rule does a router apply to determine which
of these rules should be applied to determine the output port to which the arriving packet should
be switched?

R12. Describe how packet loss can occur at output ports. Can this loss be prevented by
increasing the switch fabric speed?

R14. In Section 4.2 , we studied FIFO, Priority, Round Robin (RR), and Weighted Fair Queueing
(WFQ) packet scheduling disciplines? Which of these queueing disciplines ensure that all
packets depart in the order in which they arrived?

R16. What is an essential different between RR and WFQ packet scheduling? Is there a case
(Hint: Consider the WFQ weights) where RR and WFQ will behave exactly the same?

R17.  Suppose Host A sends Host B a TCP segment encapsulated in an IP datagram. When
Host B receives the datagram, how does the network layer in Host B know it should pass the
segment (that is, the payload of the datagram) to TCP rather than to UDP or to some other
upper-layer protocol?

R18. What field in the IP header can be used to ensure that a packet is forwarded through no
more than N routers?

R21. Do routers have IP addresses? If so, how many?

R22. What is the 32-bit binary equivalent of the IP address 223.1.3.27?

R24. . Suppose there are three routers between a source host and a destination host. Ignoring
fragmentation, an IP datagram sent from the source host to the destination host will travel over
how many interfaces? How many forwarding tables will be indexed to move the datagram from
the source to the destination?

R25. Suppose an application generates chunks of 40 bytes of data every 20 msec, and each
chunk gets encapsulated in a TCP segment and then an IP datagram. What percentage of each
datagram will be overhead, and what percentage will be application data?

R27. What is meant by the term “route aggregation”? Why is it useful for a router to perform
route aggregation?

P1.  Consider the network below.

b. Can you write down a forwarding table in router A, such that all traffic from H1 destined
to host H3 is forwarded through interface 3, while all traffic from H2 destined to host H3 is
forwarded through interface 4? (Hint: This is a trick question.)

P2. Suppose two packets arrive at two different input ports of a router at exactly the same time.
Also suppose there are no other packets anywhere in the router.

a. Suppose the two packets are to be forwarded to two different output ports. Is it possible
to forward the two packets through the switch fabric at the same time when the fabric
uses a shared bus?

b. Suppose the two packets are to be forwarded to two different output ports. Is it possible
to forward the two packets through the switch fabric at the same time when the fabric
uses switching via memory?

c. Suppose the two packets are to be forwarded to the same output port. Is it possible to
forward the two packets through the switch fabric at the same time when the fabric uses
a crossbar?

P4.  Consider the switch shown below. Suppose that all datagrams have the same fixed length,
that the switch operates in a slotted, synchronous manner, and that in one time slot a datagram
can be transferred from an input port to an output port. The switch fabric is a crossbar so that at
most one datagram can be transferred to a given output port in a time slot, but different output
ports can receive datagrams from different input ports in a single time slot. What is the minimal
number of time slots needed to transfer the packets shown from input ports to their output ports,
assuming any input queue scheduling order you want (i.e., it need not have HOL blocking)?
What is the largest number of slots needed, assuming the worst-case scheduling order you can
devise, assuming that a non-empty input queue is never idle?
P5.Consider a datagram network using 32-bit host addresses. Suppose a router has four links,
numbered 0 through 3, and packets are to be forwarded to the link interfaces as follows:

a. Provide a forwarding table that has five entries, uses longest prefix matching, and forwards packets to
the correct link interfaces. 

b. Describe how your forwarding table determines the appropriate link interface for datagrams with
destination addresses:

P6. Consider a datagram network using 8-bit host addresses. Suppose a router uses longest
prefix matching and has the following forwarding table:

Prefix Match Interface

00 0

010 1

011 2

10 2

11 3

For each of the four interfaces, give the associated range of destination host addresses and the number of
addresses in the range.
P7. Consider a datagram network using 8-bit host addresses. Suppose a router uses longest prefix
matching and has the following forwarding table:

Prefix Match Interface

1 0

10 1

111 2

otherwise 3

For each of the four interfaces, give the associated range of destination host addresses and the number of
addresses in the range.

P8.  P8. Consider a router that interconnects three subnets: Subnet 1, Subnet 2, and Subnet 3.
Suppose all of the interfaces in each of these three subnets are required to have the prefix
223.1.17/24. Also suppose that Subnet 1 is required to support at least 60 interfaces, Subnet 2 is
to support at least 90 interfaces, and Subnet 3 is to support at least 12 interfaces. Provide three
network addresses (of the form a.b.c.d/x) that satisfy these constraints.

P10.  In Problem P5 you are asked to provide a forwarding table (using longest prefix matching).
Rewrite this forwarding table using the a.b.c.d/x notation instead of the binary string notation.

P11. Consider a subnet with prefix 128.119.40.128/26. Give an example of one IP address (of
form xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) that can be assigned to this network. Suppose an ISP owns the block of
addresses of the form 128.119.40.64/26. Suppose it wants to create four subnets from this
block, with each block having the same number of IP addresses. What are the prefixes (of form
a.b.c.d/x) for the four subnets?

P17. Suppose you are interested in detecting the number of hosts behind a NAT. You observe
that the IP layer stamps an identification number sequentially on each IP packet. The
identification number of the first IP packet generated by a host is a random number, and the
identification numbers of the subsequent IP packets are sequentially assigned. Assume all IP
packets generated by hosts behind the NAT are sent to the outside world.

a. Based on this observation, and assuming you can sniff all packets sent by the NAT to the
outside, can you outline a simple technique that detects the number of unique hosts
behind a NAT? Justify your answer.

b. If the identification numbers are not sequentially assigned but randomly assigned, would
your technique work? Justify your answer.

P18. In this problem we’ll explore the impact of NATs on P2P applications. Suppose a peer with
username Arnold discovers through querying that a peer with username Bernard has a file it
wants to download. Also suppose that Bernard and Arnold are both behind a NAT. Try to devise
a technique that will allow Arnold to establish a TCP connection with Bernard without application
specific NAT configuration. If you have difficulty devising such a technique, discuss why.

CHAPTER 5. 

R4. Compare and contrast link-state and distance-vector routing algorithms.

R5. What is the “count to infinity” problem in distance vector routing?

R6. Is it necessary that every autonomous system use the same intra-AS routing algorithm?
Why or why not?

R7. Why are different inter-AS and intra-AS protocols used in the Internet?

R8. True or false: When an OSPF route sends its link state information, it is sent only to those
nodes directly attached neighbors. Explain.

R11.  How does BGP use the NEXT-HOP attribute? How does it use the AS-PATH attribute?

R13. True or false: When a BGP router receives an advertised path from its neighbor, it must
add its own identity to the received path and then send that new path on to all of its neighbors.

R20. What two types of ICMP messages are received at the sending host executing the
Traceroute program?

P3. Consider the following network. With the indicated link costs, use Dijkstra’s shortest-path
algorithm to compute the shortest path from x to all network nodes. Show how the algorithm
works by computing a table. 

P4. Consider the network shown in Problem P3. Using Dijkstra’s algorithm, and showing your
work using a table similar to Table 5.1 , do the following:
a. Compute the shortest path from t to all network nodes.
b. Compute the shortest path from u to all network nodes.
c. Compute the shortest path from v to all network nodes.
d. Compute the shortest path from w to all network nodes.
e. Compute the shortest path from y to all network nodes.
f. Compute the shortest path from z to all network nodes.

P5. . Consider the network shown below, and assume that each node initially knows the costs to
each of its neighbors. Consider the distance-vector algorithm and show the distance table
entries at node z.

P6. Consider a general topology (that is, not the specific network shown above) and a
synchronous version of the distance-vector algorithm. Suppose that at each iteration, a node
exchanges its distance vectors with its neighbors and receives their distance vectors. Assuming
that the algorithm begins with each node knowing only the costs to its immediate neighbors,
what is the maximum number of iterations required before the distributed algorithm converges?
Justify your answer.

P7.  Consider the network fragment shown below. x has only two attached neighbors, w and y. w
has a minimum-cost path to destination u (not shown) of 5, and y has a minimum-cost path to u
of 6. The complete paths from w and y to u (and between w and y) are not shown. All link costs
in the network have strictly positive integer values.

P9.  Consider the count-to-infinity problem in the distance vector routing. Will the count-to-infinity
problem occur if we decrease the cost of a link? Why? How about if we connect two nodes which
do not have a link?

P11. Consider Figure 5.7. Suppose there is another router w, connected to router y and z. The
costs of all links are given as follows: c(x,y)=4, c(x,z)=50, c(y,w)=1, c(z,w)=1, c(y,z)=3 Suppose
that poisoned reverse is used in the distance-vector routing algorithm.

a. When the distance vector routing is stabilized, router w, y, and z inform their distances to
x to each other. What distance values do they tell each other?

b. Now suppose that the link cost between x and y increases to 60. Will there be a count-to infinity
problem even if poisoned reverse is used? Why or why not? If there is a count-to infinity problem, then
how many iterations are needed for the distance-vector routing to

P12. Describe how loops in paths can be detected in BGP.

P13. Will a BGP router always choose the loop-free route with the shortest ASpath length?
Justify your answer
P14. Consider the network shown below. Suppose AS3 and AS2 are running OSPF for their

intra-AS routing protocol. Suppose AS1 and AS4 are running RIP for their intra-AS routing
protocol. Suppose eBGP and iBGP are used for the inter-AS routing protocol. Initially suppose
there is no physical link between AS2 and AS4.

a. Router 3c learns about prefix x from which routing protocol: OSPF, RIP, eBGP, or iBGP?

b. Router 3a learns about x from which routing protocol?

c. Router 1c learns about x from which routing protocol?

d. Router 1d learns about x from which routing protocol?

P15. Referring to the previous problem, once router 1d learns about x it will put an entry (x, I) in
its forwarding table.
a. Will I be equal to I or I for this entry? Explain why in one sentence.
1 2

b. Now suppose that there is a physical link between AS2 and AS4, shown by the dotted
line. Suppose router 1d learns that x is accessible via AS2 as well as via AS3. Will I be
set to I or I ? Explain why in one sentence.
1 2

c. Now suppose there is another AS, called AS5, which lies on the path between AS2 and
AS4 (not shown in diagram). Suppose router 1d learns that x is accessible via AS2 AS5
AS4 as well as via AS3 AS4. Will I be set to  I or I ? Explain why in one sentence.
1 2

P17. In Figure 5.13 , consider the path information that reaches stub networks W, X, and Y.
Based on the information available at W and X, what are their respective views of the network
topology? Justify your answer. The topology view at Y is shown below.

P18. B would never forward traffic destined to Y via X based on BGP

P19. In Figure 5.13 , suppose that there is another stub network V that is a customer of ISP A.
Suppose that B and C have a peering relationship, and A is a customer of both B and C.
Suppose that A would like to have the traffic destined to W to come from B only, and the traffic
destined to V from either B or C. How should A advertise its routes to B and C? What AS routes
does C receive?