UNIT2

Basics of Data Transmission

Transmission media.
Need for Asynchronous Communication.
Using Electric current to send bits.
Standard for communication.
Bit Rate, Baud Rate, framing, errors.
Full Duplex communication.
Hardware Limitations.
Bandwidth.
Effect of Noise on communication.
Long distance communication
Sending signals and Modem hardware used.
Carrier frequency and Multiplexing.
Base and Broad band technologies.
Packet Transmission
Concept of Packet.
Packets and TDM.
Packets and Frames.
Byte Stuffing.
Transmission errors.
Parity bits and Parity checking.
Cyclic Redundancy Check.
Basics of Data Transmission
Transmission Media
o Copper Wires.
Conventional computer networks use wires as the primary media to
connect computers because wire is inexpensive and easy to install.
Computer networks use copper wire almost exclusively because its low
resistance to electric current means signals can travel farther.
Copper wires has three types
Unshielded Twisted Pair.(UTP)
Coaxial Cable
Shielded Twisted Pairs.(STP)
o Glass Fibers.
Computers also use flexible glass fibers to transmit data. Known as an
optical fiber, the medium uses light to transmit data.

Optical fibers neither cause electrical interference in other cables nor

are they susceptible to electrical interference.
One of the disadvantages is it is very expensive.
Radio
For the public broadcast of radio and television programs and for
private communication with devices like portable phones,
electromagnetic radiation can be used to transmit computer data.
A network that uses electromagnetic radio waves is said to operate at
radio frequency, and the transmissions are referred to as RF
transmissions.
Each participating computer attaches to an antenna, which can both
transmit and receive RF.
Satellites.
Although radio transmission do not bend around the surface of the
earth, RF technology can be combined with satellites to provide
communication across long distances.
Geosynchronous satellites
It remains to appear at exactly the same point in the sky at all
Time.
Low Earth Orbit Satellites.
Satellites in lower orbits do not stay above a single point on
the earths surface.
Microwave
Microwaves are merely like radio waves, but they behave differently.
Instead of broad casting in all directions, a micro wave transmission
can be aimed in a single direction.
It works best when a clear path exists between transmitter and receiver.
Infrared
The wireless remote controls used with appliances as televisions with
infrared transmission.
It is limited to small area.
It is expensive compare to other, and does not require an antenna.
Light From A Laser
A beam of light can be used to carry data through air.
Light from a laser must travel in a straight line and must not be
blocked.

Need for Asynchronous Communication.

o A communication is called asynchronous if a sender and receiver do not need
to coordinate before data can be transmitted.
o When using asynchronous communication, a sender can wait long between
transmissions and can transmit whenever data becomes ready.
o Receiver must be ready to accept data whenever it arrives.
Using Electric current to send bits.

o The simplest electronic communication systems use a small electric current to

encode data.
o Voltage is passed through wires may vary.
Standard for communication.
o Organizations such as ITU, EIA, IEEE publish specification for
communication equipment is document is known as standards.
o RS-232 is a popular standard used for Asynchronous, serial
communication over short distance between a computer and a modem.
Bit Rate, Baud Rate, framing errors.
o Bit rate-Number of bits per second.
o Baud rate-Number of changing signals or pulses per second.
o Framing Error-An error caused because of different bond in receiver and sender
end.
Full duplex communication.
o Half duplex means two way communication but given time only one way
communication.
o In full duplex simultaneous communication in both directions.
o Uses twisted wires one of the wires carries the signal and another is a ground that
provides a return path.
o When a signal is sent through a coaxial cable, the signals travels down the
conductor, and shield provides a return path.
Hardware Limitations.
o Loss of strength due to resistance.
o As electric current travels down the wire, the signal losses energy.
o As a result, it takes a small time for the voltage to raise or fall, and the
signal received is not perfect.
Bandwidth.
o Band width-range of frequency that can be used to transmit data.
o The maximum rate that the hardware can change a signal.
o If a sender attempts to transmit changes faster than the bandwidth, the
hardware will be not able to keep up because it will not have sufficient
time to complete one change before the sender attempts to make another.
Thus times changes will be lost.
Effect of Noise on communication.
o Nyquists theorem provides an absolute maximum that cannot be achieved in
practice.
o Real communication system is subject to small amount of background interference
called noise.

o Such noise makes it impossible to achieve the theoretical maximum transmission

rate.
Long distance communication
Sending signals and Modem hardware used.
o Instead of transmitting an electric current that only changes when the value of a bit
changes, long distance communication system send a continuously oscillating signals,
usually a sine wire called a carrier.
o To send data, a transmitter modifies the carrier slightly.
o Such modifications are called as modulation.
o The receiver monitors the incoming carrier, detects the modulation, reconstructs the
original data and discards the carrier.
o Network technologies use a variety of modulation techniques, including amplitude
and frequency modulation, the techniques used by AM and FM radio stations.
Carrier frequency and Multiplexing.
o Two or more signals that use different carrier frequencies can be transmitted over a
signal medium simultaneously without interference.
o Computer networks use the principle of separate channels to permit multiple
communications to share a signal, physical connection.
o Each sender transmits a signal using a particular carrier frequency.
o A receiver configured to accept a carrier at a given frequency will not be affected by
signals sent at other frequencies.
o Thus, multiple carrier can pass over the same wire at the same time without
interference.
Base and Broad band technologies.
o Base band
Technology in which entire bandwidth is consumed by single
signal.
Digital signals are sent through basic electricity or light wave.
Uses half duplex method.
o Broad band
It allows multiple signals to be sent at a time using FDM.
Analog signals are sent through modulations.
Broad band technique can travel far.
Uses full duplex.
High data transfer rate.

Packet Transmission
Concept of Packet.
o Network system divides data into small blocks called packets, which it
sends individually.
o Computer networks are often called packet networks or packet switching
networks because they use packet technologies.
o A sender and receiver need to coordinate transmission to ensure that data
arrives correctly.
o Dividing the data helps the sender and receiver determine which block
arrive intact and which do not.
o Multiple computers often share underlying connections and hardware.
Packets and TDM.
o TDM-Time Division Multiplexing.
o Dividing transmission time slots and allocating it among different transmitters.
o This approach round robin algorithm.
o Dividing packets into small packets ensure that all sources receive prompt
service because it prohibits one source from gaining exclusive access for an
arbitrarily long time.
o If one source has a few packets to send and another has many, allowing both
sources to take turns sending packets guarantees that the source with small
amount of data will finish promptly.

Packets and Frames.

o Frames are used to send group of packets through network.
o The network system can choose two unused values and use them to mark the
beginning and end of each frame.
o The term soh and eot are used while transferring frames through networks.
o The sender transmits soh followed by the characters of data followed by eot.
o Beginning and end of the frame can be easily identified.
Byte Stuffing.
o Although using characters to mark the beginning and end of each frame has
advantages, most computer networks cannot afford to reverse characters to use
by the network.
o Instead, the network permits an application to transfer arbitrary characters
across the network.
o To implement byte stuffing, a sender scan entire data block and perform the
mapping before any data is sent.
soh-escx
eot-escy
esc-escz

o The mapping has been chosen carefully to guarantee that after a sender
finishes byte stuffing, the character soh and eot do not occur in the data
section of a frame.
o Thus, a receiver can be sure that soh always delimits the beginning of a frame
and eot always delimits end of the frame.

Transmission errors.
o Much of the complexity networks arises because digital transmission systems
are susceptible to interference that can cause random data to appear or
transmitted data to be lost or changed.
o Transmission errors, the problem of lost, changed, or spuriously appearing bits
account for much of the complexity needed in computer networks.
Parity bits and Parity checking.
o To detect errors, network systems usually send a small amount of additional
information with the data.
o A sender computes the value of the additional information from the data, and a
receiver performs the same computation to verify that the packet was
transmitted without error.
o A sender compute additional bit called parity bit, and to attach it to each
character before sending.
o After all bits of character arrives, the receiver removes the parity bit, and
performs same computation as sender.
Cyclic Redundancy Check.
o CRC is used, without increasing the amount of additional information in the
packets.
o It can detect more error than checksum.
o Shift register and exclusive or is used in CRC.
o Shift register has two operations: initialize and shift. When told to initialize a
shift register sets all bits to zero, its output also becomes zero.
o When told shift, a shift register instantaneously moves all bits to the left one
position, sets the rightmost bit according to the current input, and sets the
output according to the leftmost bit.