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WAN - WIDE AREA NETWORKING

Wide Area Networks (WANs) has been developed to allow communication through long distances and among high number of customers. WAN technologies has to provide scalability, it means, they have to be able to cover large geographic areas and serve many users, they have to extend dynamically both in coverage area and number of users and they have to allow parallel communication sessions. This module is the summary of lecture 10. It briefly addresses long distance digital connection solutions. Describes the switched network architecture and explain circuit and packet switching. Focusing on packet switching it compares datagram and virtual circuit switching, explains basic routing algorithms and the importance of congestion control. Finally public and private networking is explained and an example is given how different networking technologies cooperate in a typical communication session like web browsing.

For this module you should read the following sections in the book, Computer Networks and Internets, 2nd edition Douglas E. Comer, 11.1 - 12, 13.1 - 13.6, 22.

Long distance digital connection technologies

For long distance data transmission computer networks use digital leased lines of telephone core networks in most cases. Consequently, the transmission capacity of these connections follows telephony standards like the T (North America) or E (Europe) standard for transmission rates from 1.544Mbps/2.048Mbps to 45/34 Mbps. Higher capacity connections up to 2Gbps are standardized within the SDH (Europe) or SONET (North Amerika) standard.In addition to the transmission rates these standards define how data is framed and how lower capacity circuits are multiplexed and demultiplexed. Specifically, the SDH/SONET solution allows a simple multiplexing/demultiplexing of low capacity circuits without the need of demultiplexing of the entire data flow.

Switched Networks
As we have seen before, shared media communication, extensively used for local area computing, introduces severe scalability problems. Therefore communication beyond the local area is typically achieved by transmitting information through a network of intermediate switching nodes. Switching nodes are not concerned with the actual content of the information, they provide only a facility to move information from the source towards the destination. Switched networks can extend dynamically by additional switching nodes and links as the number of end users, the network coverage area or the amount of information transmitted increases.

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Definitions:
switching nodes: end nodes: route: nodes inside the network performing the transmission of information from the incoming link to one outgoing link. end devices wishing to communicate, like computers, terminals, telephones, faxes, etc. is the sequence of communication links from the source node to the destination node through the switching network. the way a route is selected between two end nodes

routing:

Figure 6.1 Simple Switching Network

Circuit and packet switching

Two quite different technologies are used in wide area switched networks considering the way information is switched from one link to the other towards the destination. These techniques are circuit switching (CS) and packet switching (PS).

Circuit switching

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Well known example of CS networks is the public telephone network (public switched telephone network, PSTN). In CS networks a connection path (or route) is established between the end nodes before communication, with fixed dedicated transmission and switching capacities. The communication thus involves three phases: circuit establishment, when a free communication channel (FDM or TDM) is allocated, the information transfer itself, and the circuit disconnection with the deallocation of the channel. The main advantage of CS is the negligible end to end transmission delay and delay variation, that is why this technology has been used for voice (and video) communication. Drawbacks of the CS technology is the delayed information transfer due to the call setup time and the fixed allocated capacity that can lead to low network utilization if information is sent with variable intensity, as it is typical in case of data transmission.

Packet switching

A well known example of PS networks is the Internet. In PS networks information is transmitted in short packets. Each switching node stores the incoming packet, decides about the outgoing link the packet should be transmitted to and forwards the packet (places it to the respective outgoing queue). This technology is often referred to as "store and forward". The main advantage of packet switching is the efficient utilization of transmission capacity even in case of information transmission with variable intensity, thus data networks are usually based on PS technology. The store and forward based packet transmission on the other hand may introduce large waiting times at the switching nodes, and thus increase the end to end transmission delay and delay variation. Consequently the use of PS networks for voice and video transmission is far from being trivial. Communication often means the transmission of a stream of packets from one end node to another. Based on the way a stream of packets is handled two service paradigms are defined: datagram and virtual circuit switching (VCS). Datagram networks, often referred as connectionless networks, transmit each one of a stream of packets independently. The main advantage of this solution is that no connection setup phase is required, information transmission can start immediately as information to transmit is present. On the other side, full end node address has to be inserted in each packet, causing large overhead, and since packets might be transmitted

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on different routes they might arrive to the end node with large delay variation and even out of sequence. VCS networks, referred as connection oriented PS networks, provide some kind of compromise between CS and PS. In these PS networks there is a connection setup phase before information transmission, when the transmission route is fixed and capacity might be allocated. Each packet contains a connection identifier, much shorter that the destination address to assist routing.

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Please read Section 12.17 in Computer Networks and Internets, for example Wan Technologies.

VNING 6.1 - 6.4

6.1 List the advantages and disadvantages of VCS considering set up delay, transmission delay and variance, out of sequence delivery, packet header overhead, network utilization. Compare VCS to CS and datagram transmission. 6.2 The following parameters are defined in a PS or CS network: N: number of hops between two stations L: message length in bits B: link speed in bits/second P: packet size in bits (fixed size packets) H: overhead in bits per packet or message S: call setup time in seconds (for CS or VCS network) D: per link propagation delay in seconds a) Calculate the end to end delay (i.e., the delay from the sender to the receiver) in a CS, VCS or datagram PS network. Assume, that there are no additional delays at the switching nodes. Assume N= 4, L= 3200 bits, B= 9600 bit/s, P= 1024 bits, H= 16 bits, S= 0.2 sec, D= 0.001 sec. b) Find the general expression for end to end delays for the three technologies. c) In points a) and b) the delays due to routing and reading routing tables has been summarized. How does it effect the result? 6.3 Use the same parameters as in the previous problem. Assume, however, that L is much larger than P and D is equal to zero. How should be the size of P selected as a function of N, B and H to get minimum delay in a datagram network? 6.4 Explain in details the addressing on network level in case of a) PS datagram network b) PS VCS c) CS network

Routing

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A packet switch must choose an outgoing link for each packet that arrives to the switch. In datagram networks the packet switch uses the destination address stored in the packet to make the choice. In VCS networks a destination address based link selection is performed in the call setup phase, after that outgoing links are selected based on the connection identlifier. The packet switch decides only about the next link (next hop) to reach the destination. This concept is called as next hop forwarding. Next hop information is organized into a routing table at each switch. The routing table has to be universal in the sense that it contains an entry for packets with arbitrary destination address and optimal in the sense that packets are routed through an optimal route, e.g., width the smallest number of hops or with the lowest expected end to end delay (commonly referred as least cost route).

The procedure of defining the entries of the routing tables called routing. In case of static routing routing tables are defined by the network administrators while with dynamic routing routing tables are updated by a distributed routing algorithm as conditions in the network change. The optimality criteria is defined by the network administrators. Routing algorithms use the graph representation of the network and apply algorithms from graph theory. The network is represented by a graph where each node corresponds to a packet switch and each edge to a communication link. A weight (or cost) can be assigned to each edge representing some cost of transmitting packet on the respective communication link, e.g., the queuing delay at the output port. In most PS networks some variation of Dijkstra's algorithm or the Bellman-Ford algorithm is used as a bases to compute the shortest path or the least cost path in the graph representing the PS network.

Dijkstra's algorithm
Dijkstra's algorithm can be stated as:

Find the shortest path from a given source node to all other nodes by developing the paths in order of increasing path length. The algorithm proceeds in stages. By the kth stage, the shortest path to the k nodes closest to (least cost away from) the source node have been determined; these nodes are in set M. At stage k+1 the node not in M that has the shortest path from the source node is added to M. As each node is added to M, its path from the source is defined.

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A distributed protocol based on Dijkstra's algorithm is the Link State Routing protocol. Using this protocol packet switches broadcast link status information on all of their outgoing links to all other switches. Each switch collects these status messages, builds the graph of the network, calculates the shortest path to the destinations and fills its routing table. The advantage of this solution is that after receiving the status message each switch can calculate its routing table simultaneously. On the other hand, it requires that each node in the graph has a complete knowledge on the graph topology and link costs.

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The Bellman-Ford algorithm

The Bellman-Ford algorithm can be stated as follows:

Find the shortest paths from a given source node subject to the constraint that the path contains, at most, one link; then find the shortest paths with a constraint of paths of, at most, two links, and so on. This algorithm also proceeds in stages and the number of stages is equal to the length of the longest route in the graph.
The Distance Vector Routing realizing the Bellman-Ford algorithm, works the following way:

Each packet switch periodically sends routing information to its neighbors. Each message contains pairs (destination, distance). When a message arrives the switch examines each item and changes the routing table if the neighbor advertises a shorter path. Consequently, this algorithm requires message exchange between neighboring switches only.

Congestion control
In a previous module we have seen how network access on a shared media LAN is controlled. In a wide area packet switched network however end nodes act independently and they do not synchronize when and how fast they transmit information to the network. Consequently, it might happen, that link capacities inside the network are not sufficient to forward the arriving packets. This situation is called congestion. Long term congestions are avoided by careful dimensioning of the network (i.e., what are the link capacities needed), while short term congestions are handled with congestion control mechanisms. To understand why congestion is dangerous lets follow what happens if a network link gets congested. As there are more packet arriving to the puffer at the outgoing link that it is able to forward a queue of packets builds up in the puffer. Packets arriving to the puffer might get lost if the puffer is full or might experience a large delay resulting the end node to report packet loss. For reliable transmission source nodes has to retransmit this lost - or delayed - packets in addition to the new data they send. Consequently, the load on the congested link further increases up to the point when practically no packet arrives to the destination nodes and the effective capacity of the system gets virtually zero.

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Fig 6.2 congestion Congestion in a packet switching network can be handled with the following mechanisms:
l

The congested node sends control packet to some or all source nodes or inserts congestion information into packets going to the source nodes. Nodes add congestion information to packets going by. Destinations then ask the sources to adjust their transmission rate. The source node relays on routing information containing end to end delays. The destination node asks the source to back off if packet losses are detected (this mechanism is followed in tcp/ip networks). Some kind of admission control is applied for new connections or the network status is measured with probe packets.

Public and private networks

The needs for wide area communication are very diverse. They include the plain old telephone service, access to public servers, connection of company sites or banks around the world. While local area networks are usually owned by the corporation who uses it, WANs might be private or public. Public WANs work like the telephone network, anyone can subscribe and can reach other subscribers. The users do not care about the management and maintenance of the network. Private WANs in contrast provide secure and controlled communication but require large investment and technical expertise. To provide the advantages of both systems public network operators offer virtual private network (VPN) services, where subscribers (usually companies with remote sites) use the public network to communicate but the VPN technology ensures privacy and security. LAN's, MAN's and the different type of WANs are usually not stand alone systems but are connected or even use each others infrastructure (e.g.

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VPN). One communication session might include information transmission through a sequence of networks.

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VNING 6.8

6.8 Assume, that you are sitting at home with your computer, having dial up connection to a department at the university. You are browsing a web site of a small company in the USA. List the sequence of networks you are using in this communication session.

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