First draft questions for section 5, part 1.

Here are some first-draft questions from the first 10 pages of the readings for
section 5 (pages 441 to 450 in the K&R fifth edition).

First-draft questions are sloppy and rough, but some of them go on to become
test questions.  Because they're in first draft, the questions may not make
sense, or they may not have answers, or the answers may require ridiculous
amounts of work to find.  However, they are drawn from the readings and may be
helpful in that way, if not useful in any other way.

--

* Define:

  nodes
  links
  link-layer protocol
  frames
  network adapter
  network interface card (nic)
  bit-level error detection and correction
  undetected bit errors

* What characteristics about the data-link and transport layers suggest they
offer similar services?

* Sketch the behavior of a link-access service for a full-duplex point-to-point
link.

* Compare and contrast reliability service at the transport and data-link
layers. 

* One important factor in determining the value of error recovery and detection
services is the cost of recovering from list PDUs.  Making suitable
assumptions, provide estimated bit-error rates (in errors/bits) such that the
cost of recovering from errors at the data-link layer is the same (roughly) as
the cost of recovering from errors at the transport layer.

* Develop a data-link layer protocol that turns a full-duplex link into a
half-duplex link.