Computer Networking

Homework 4, 14 March 2013

This homework assignment has five questions; answer all of them. This assignment is due no later than 1:00 p.m. on Thursday, 4 April.

If you mail in your assignment, please submit a printable document — a PostScript .ps or PDF .pdf document, for example — and not a source document — a Word .docx or Latex .tex document, for example.

1. A host on one bridged LAN moves to another LAN on the same network. How long can the host expect to be unreachable by some portions of the network (do not include the time the host was in transit between LANs). Justify your answer.
2. Explain the problems that can arise when a bridge has, directly or indirectly, more than one connection to the same LAN.
3. A 10 Mb/s Ethernet hub is replaced by by a 10 Mb/s switch in an environment where all traffic is between a single server and N clients. Would you expect there to be any improvement in bandwidth after the change? Justify your answer.
4. What would be the consequences of using distance-vector style host information dissemination in a link-state routing algorithm?
5. True or false: if a network is two-connected (that is, any two hosts in the network always have two separate paths between them), then a distance-vector routing algorithm in such a network won't have the count-to-infinity problem.