Course

Number

Telecommunication Networks
Examination

Section

ELEC 463 / ELEC 6851

Date

Final Exam

Time

3 Hours

# of pages

Instructor (s)

Dr. M. Mehmet Ali

Material allowed :

Calculators allowed :

No

No

Yes

Yes

Special Instructions:

Attempt all six questions.

Handwriting should be clear and readable.
Whenever possible include diagrams to make solutions more clear.
Students should return the question paper after the exam.
All the answers should be in the answering book.
Some formulas that may be needed are provided at the end of the exam.
Question 1. (20 points) Give a comparison of circuit and packet-switched networks.
Question 2. ( 20 points) Consider p-persistent CSMA-CD protocol,
i)
ii)
iii)

Describe the operation of this protocol.

Assuming that there are n users contending during a contention interval,
derive the expression for maximum success probability during a minislot.
Determine the maximum success probability as n increases.
Derive the expression for the maximum throughput for this protocol.

Question 3. (20 points) Explain the TCP congestion control algorithm including fast
retransmit and recovery.

Question 4. (20 points) A 128,000bytes message will be transmitted from the source
to the destination in the network shown below. Assume that the signal propagates at a
speed of 2 * 10 5 km/second and each hop has a bit error rate of p 10 6 . The network
limits the packets to a maximum size of 2,000bytes and each packet has a 32-byte header.
Assume that the size of ACK/NACK packet is 40bytes and that the transmission of
ACK/NACK packets are error free. There are no queueing delays, the processing times
are negligible and the time out duration has been chosen to expire at the arrival time of
ACK/NACK. Determine the average time it will take to transmit the message from
source to destination in each of the following cases,
i)

Assuming that hop-by-hop Stop-and-Wait ARQ protocol is being used. A

switch may begin the transmission of a packet at the second hop as soon as
it has been received error free from the first hop and similarly source
begins the transmission of the next packet.

ii)

Assuming that end-to-end Stop-and-Wait ARQ is being used. As soon as

the last bit of a packet arrives at the switch, its transmission over the
second link begins. ACK/NACK are sent by the destination and the source
doesnot begin the transmission of the next packet until the present packet
is received error free by the destination.

Note: You have to show the intermediate steps in your calculations.

1000km
Source

1Mbps

1500km
Switch

2Mbps

Destination

Question 5. (20 points) Suppose that we wish to transmit a large message L 10 Mbits
over a link and that the message will be broken into 100Kbits packets. A packet is
transmitted simultaneously over two independent channels as shown in the figure below.
If a packet is received error free in at least in one of the channels, then the transmission of
the packet is successful otherwise the packet will require retransmission. Assume that the
5
probability of bit error on each channel is p 10 . Determine the average number of
bits that it will take to transmit the message from the source to the destination,
i)
ii)

Assuming that Stop-and Wait ARQ is used between source and

destination.
Assuming that the original Go-Back N ARQ is used with N= 5 between
source and destination. Compare and explain this result with that of part
i) .
Channel 1
Source

Destination
Channel 2

Question 6. (20 points) Consider a reservation system with N stations. The length of
each minislot is m bits and the information in minislots are always received error free.
Each station has a message to transmit during a frame with probability q and no message
with probability 1-q. Message lengths are n bits and messages may be received in error
by destinations. Assume that each bit of a message may be received in error with
probability p by a destination. The transmission rate on the channel is R bps and the
propagation delays are negligible.
i ) Determine the average duration of a frame.
ii) Determine the throughput of this system.
Formulas:
Poisson distribution:
Pr ob ( k arrivals )

(t ) k e t
k!

Binomial distribution:
n k
p (1 p ) n k
k

Pr ob ( k successes in n trials)

Geometric distribution:
Pr ob ( first success occurs on the k ' th trial) p (1 p ) k 1 ,
1

Expected number of trials for the first success to occur = E[k ] p