Hardware Building Blocks and Encoding

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BEE8B Computer Networks

Performance
Bandwidth: number of bits per time unit.
(a) 1

(b) 1

We can talk about bandwidth at the physical level, but we can also talk about logical process-to-process bandwidth.

Latency: time taken for a message to travel from one end of the network to the other.
Again, we can consider a single-link or an end-to-end channel.

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Latency
Latency Propagation Transmit Queue Propagation Distance / Speed of light

Transmit Size / Bandwidth

2.0 10 8 m / s in a fiber Speed of light 2.3 10 8 m / s in a cable 3.0 10 8 m / s in a vaccum

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Delay x Bandwidth
Delay Bandwidth

This product is analogous to the volume of a pipe or the number of bits it holds. It corresponds to how many bits the sender must transmit before the first bit arrives at the receiver. Delay may be thought of as one-way latency or round-trip time (RTT) depending on the context.

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Throughput
Throughput Transfer size / Transfer t ime
(effective end-to-end throughput)

Transfer t ime RTT (1/Bandwidth) Transfersize

We usually think of throughput as measured performance. Implementation inefficiencies may cause the achievable bit rate to be less than the bandwidth for which the networks was designed.
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Throughput and Transfer Time

Example: A user fetches a 1-MB file across a 1-G pbs network with a round-trip time of 100 ms. Compute the transfer time.
1 TransferTime RTT ( 9 ) 106 8 100ms 8ms 108ms 10

EffectiveT hroughput 1Mbps / 108ms 74.1Mbps

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Shannons Theorem
Real communication have some measure of noise. This theorem tells us the limits to a channels capacity (in bits per second) in the presence of noise. Shannons theorem uses the notion of signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), which is usually expressed in decibels (dB):

dB 10 log 10 ( S / N )
In a typical analog system, e.g. analog telephone system, dB = 30, which gives 30 = 10 * log10(S/N), thus S/N = 1000 for a typical analog system, including plain old telephone systems (POTS)
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Building Blocks
Networks nodes Links
Dedicated cables Leased lines Last-mile links Wireless
Workstation PC, Processor or Device

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Network Node
Memory: getting larger and larger, but never infinitely so. Processor: Moores law still holds for speed (memory latency improves much slower 7%, however). On a typical networked application, one must keep in mind the computation to communication ratio.
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CPU

Cache

Network adaptor

(To network)

I/O bus Memory

Managed by device driver

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Links & Signals

Links: Twisted pair, coax, optical fiber, the ether; half-duplex or full-duplex. Signals: Electromagnetic waveforms that travel on some medium (at the speed of light).
T (period)

1 f T
(frequency)

= ?
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Frequency & Wavelength

Wavelength: the distance between a pair of adjacent Maxima or minima of a wave, denoted as . *f = c, c is the speed of light in a given medium. Example: take c = 300 M meters/second, f = 100 M Hz, its wavelength = 3 meters

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Spectrum

f(Hz) 10

10

10

10

10

10

10

10

12

10

14

10 UV

16

10

18

10

20

10

22

10

24

Radio

Microwav e

Inf rared

X ray

Gamma ray

10

10

10

10

10

10

10

10

10

11

10

12

10

13

10

14

10

15

10

16

Satellite Coax AM FM TV Terrestrial microwav e

Fiber optics

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Encoding NRZ (Non-Return to Zero)

Signalling component

Baseline wander Clock recovery

Signal Node Adaptor Bits Adaptor Node

NRZ: Encode 0s and 1s using two different levels. Problem 1: The signal is synchronous; that is, theres a reference clock marking the length of each bit.
Bits 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0

NRZ

Problem 2: Separating 0s from 1s is not trivial.

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NRZI and Manchester Encoding

Bits NRZ Clock Manchester NRZI 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0

Clock recovery depends on transitions. To keep clocks in sync, the more transitions the better; too few and clocks will drift.

NRZI: Encode 1s using transitions; 0s keep current level.

Manchester: low to high signals a 0, high to low signals a 1.
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Summary
NRZ: Baseline wander and clock recovery are problem. NRZI: 0s have no transitions and thus they wont help with clock recovery. Manchester: Doubles the rate of transitions making clock recovery easier, on the other hand, it doubles the rate of transitions. Since there are 2 transitions for every single bit, the efficiency (information per unit of time) drops by 50%. 4B/5B ?
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4B/5B Encoding
Basic idea: Insert extra bits into the stream to break up long sequences of 0s and 1s. Doesnt allow more than one leading 0 and no more than two trailing 0s.
4 bits

5 bits

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4B/5B Encoding
4-bit Data Symbol 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001 1010 1011 1100 1101 5-bit Code 11110 01001 10100 10101 01010 01011 01110 01111 10010 10011 10110 10111 11010 11011

24 16 25 32
16 codes are left over and some can be used for purposes other than encoding data. For instance: 11111 = idle line 00000 = dead line 00100 = halt 7 codes violate the one leading 0, two trailing 0s rule.
17

1110
1111 7/26/2013

11100
11101

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