Lecture Handout

PROBLEM WITH BROADCASTING:

There are some problems with the broadcast. For every broadcast frame on the network each computer uses computational resources and places the contents into memory, which interrupt the CPU. It allows system software to make the decision whether to discard or use the frames. Another problem is that if a pair of computer use broadcasting instead of sending them directly all other computers waste CPU time while discarding the frames.

MULTICASTING:
The solution to above problem is multicasting. It is the restricted form of broadcasting. It works like broadcasting however it does not forward frames automatically to the CPU. The interface hardware is programmed in advance to accept certain frames that have multicast address as the destination address. If an application program wishes to receive certain frames then it program the interface hardware to accept an additional set of addresses. The interface hardware frame then begins accepting three types of frames: Multicast frames Broadcast frames The frames that are distend to the station itself.

MULTICAST ADDRESSING:
We take an example of computers running an audio application. We see that they can receive audio frames if the interface are programmed to received them and the other computers that are not running that audio application will not waste resources .

IDENTIFYING PACKET CONTENTS:

The destination must get some clue about how to interpret frame data. For this purpose it can use two types which are given as follows.

EXPLICIT FRAME TYPE:

In this type the identifying value is included with frame describes types of included data.

IMPLICIT FRAME TYPE:

In implicit frame the receiver must infer from frame data.

HEADERS AND FRAME FORMAT:

LAN technology standards define frame format for each technology. All contemporary standards use the following general format. a) Frame header b) payload Frame header has address and other identifying information. Information typically in fields has fixed size and location. The data area may vary in size. The Ethernet frame format is shown in the figure.

Figure 10.1 the Ethernet frame format

The different friends of ether frame format and their purposes is explained below:

FIELD
Preamble Destination Address Source Address Frame Type Data CRC

PURPOSE
Receiver synchronization Identifies intended receiver Hardware address of sender Type of data carried in frame Frame payload 32-bit CRC code

ETHERNET FIELDS:
In Ethernet fields the preamble and CRC is often not shown in frame. The destination address of all is the broadcast address. There is special value reserved for frame type field.

FRAME WITHOUT TYPE FIELDS:

Some LAN technologies do not include a type field. Sender and receiver can agree on interpretation, which is as follows: They agree on single data format and use only that format this limits to one type of data. In this way all computers on LAN must use one format. Also they agree to encode the data format into first few bytes of the data field.

ENCODING THE DATA TYPE:

The figure illustrates a frame in which the data type is specified by using the data area.

Figure 10.2. Encoding the data type

To ensure interoperability format of encoding area must be universally agreed upon it typically set by standards only.

IEEE 802.2 LLC:

IEEE 802.2 standard includes logical link control (LLC) sub network attachment point (SNAP) header. SNAP/LLC format is widely used for example by Ethernet. This is shown in figure below:

Figure 10.3. SNAP/LLC format

In the figure LLC portion indicates SNAP field to follow OUI (organizationally unique identifier) identifies Ethernet specification organization. Also the type field is interpreted as in Ethernet (in this case, IP ) as shown in figure above.

UNKNOWN TYPES:
For either encoding format some computer may not be prepared to accept frames of some types, which are unknown e.g. protocol type is not installed and the newly defined type. The receiving computer examines the field and discards any frame with unknown type.

NETWORK ANALYZERS:
A network analyzer also called network monitor or a network sniffer is used to examine the performance of or debug a network. It can report statistics such as capacity utilization, distribution of frame size, collision rate or token circulation time.

OPERATION OF NETWORK ANALYZERS:

The basic idea behind the operation of network analyzer is a computer with a network interface that receives all frames, which is called promiscuous mode. Many desktop computers have interface that can be configured for promiscuous mode. When combined with software computer can examine any frame on LAN. In this way the communication across LAN is guaranteed to be private. This computer receives and displays (but does not respond to) frames on the LAN. Network analyzer can be configured to filter and process frames. It can count frames of specific type of size. It displays only frames from or to specific computers. In general it can be configured to match any value of any field and capture only these frames meeting the filter specifications.
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