Networks Fundemantals 1

Lecture 4 Ethernet

Ethernet
Ethernet has pretty much taken over the wired LAN market. In the 1980s and the early
1990s, Ethernet faced many challenges from other LAN technologies, including token ring,
FDDI, and ATM. Some of these other technologies succeeded in capturing a part of the
LAN market for a few years. But since its invention in the addressing mid-1970s, Ethernet
has continued to evolve and grow and has held on to its dominant position. Today, Ethernet
is by far the most prevalent wired LAN technology, and it is likely to remain so for the
foreseeable future. One might say that Ethernet has been to local area networking what the
Internet has been to global networking.

There are many reasons for Ethernet’s success. First, Ethernet was the first widely deployed
high-speed LAN. Because it was deployed early, network administrators became intimately
familiar with Ethernet and were reluctant to switch over to other LAN technologies when
they came on the scene. Second, token ring, FDDI, and ATM were more complex and
expensive than Ethernet, which further discouraged network administrators from switching
over. Third, the most compelling reason to switch to another LAN technology (such as FDDI
or ATM) was usually the higher data rate of the new technology; however, Ethernet always
fought back, producing versions that operated at equal data rates or higher. Switched
Ethernet was also introduced in the early 1990s, which further increased its effective data
rates. Finally, because Ethernet has been so popular, Ethernet hardware (in particular,
adapters and switches) has become a commodity and is remarkably cheap. The original
Ethernet LAN was invented in the mid-1970s by Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs. The
original Ethernet LAN used a coaxial bus to interconnect the nodes. Bus topologies for
Ethernet actually persisted throughout the 1980s and into the mid-1990s. Ethernet with a
bus topology is a broadcast LAN, all transmitted frames travel to and are processed by all
adapters connected to the bus. By the late 1990s, most companies and universities had
replaced their LANs with Ethernet installations using a hub-based star topology. In such an
installation the hosts (and routers) are directly connected to a hub with twisted-pair copper
wire. A hub is a physical-layer device that acts on individual bits rather than frames. When
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Lecture 4 Ethernet

a bit, representing a zero or a one, arrives from one interface, the hub simply re-creates the
bit, boosts its energy strength, and transmits the bit onto all the other interfaces. Thus,
Ethernet with a hub-based star topology is also a broadcast LAN—whenever a hub receives
a bit from one of its interfaces, it sends a copy out on all of its other interfaces. In particular,
if a hub receives frames from two different interfaces at the same time, a collision occurs
and the nodes that created the frames must retransmit.

In the early 2000s Ethernet experienced yet another major evolutionary change. Ethernet
installations continued to use a star topology, but the hub at the center was replaced with a
switch.

MAC Addresses
It is not hosts and routers that have link-layer addresses but rather their adapters (that is,
network interfaces) that have link-layer addresses. A host or router with multiple network
interfaces will thus have multiple link-layer addresses associated with it, just as it would
also have multiple IP addresses associated with it. It's important to note, however, that link-
layer switches do not have link-layer addresses associated with their interfaces that connect
to hosts and routers. This is because the job of the link-layer switch is to carry datagrams
between hosts and routers; a switch does this job transparently, that is, without the host or
router having to explicitly address the frame to the intervening switch. This is illustrated in
the Figure below . A link-layer address is variously called a LAN address, a physical
address, or a MAC address. Because MAC address seems to be the most popular term. For
most LANs (including Ethernet and 802.11 wireless LANs), the MAC address is 6 bytes
long, giving 2^48 possible MAC addresses. These 6-byte addresses are typically expressed
in hexadecimal notation, with each byte of the address expressed as a pair of hexadecimal
numbers. Although MAC addresses were designed to be permanent, it is now possible to
change an adapter’s MAC address via software. For the rest of this lecture, however, we’ll
assume that an adapter’s MAC address is fixed. One interesting property of MAC addresses
is that no two adapters have the same address. This might seem surprising given that adapters
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Lecture 4 Ethernet

are manufactured in many countries by many companies. How does a company

manufacturing adapters in Taiwan make sure that it is using different addresses from a
company manufacturing adapters in Belgium? The answer is that the IEEE manages the
MAC address space. In particular, when a company wants to manufacture adapters, it
purchases a chunk of the address space consisting of 224 addresses for a nominal fee. IEEE
allocates the chunk of 224 addresses by fixing the first 24 bits of a MAC address and letting
the company create unique combinations of the last 24 bits for each adapter.

Services Provided by the Link Layer

1-Framing. Almost all link-layer protocols encapsulate each network-layer datagram within
a link-layer frame before transmission over the link. A frame consists of a data field, in
which the network-layer datagram is inserted, and a number of header fields. The structure
of the frame is specified by the link-layer protocol.

2-Link access. A medium access control (MAC) protocol specifies the rules by which a
frame is transmitted onto the link. For point-to-point links that have a single sender at one
end of the link and a single receiver at the other end of the link, the MAC protocol is simple
, the sender can send a frame whenever the link is idle. The more interesting case is when
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Lecture 4 Ethernet

multiple nodes share a single broadcast link the so-called multiple access problem. Here, the
MAC protocol serves to coordinate the frame transmissions of the many nodes.

3-Reliable delivery. When a link-layer protocol provides reliable delivery service, it

guarantees to move each network-layer datagram across the link without error. Recall that
certain transport-layer protocols (such as TCP) also provide a reliable delivery service.
Similar to a transport-layer reliable delivery service, a link-layer reliable delivery service
can be achieved with acknowledgments and retransmissions. A link-layer reliable delivery
service is often used for links that are prone to high error rates, such as a wireless link, with
the goal of correcting an error locally on the link where the error occurs rather than forcing
an end-to end retransmission of the data by a transport- or application-layer protocol.
However, link-layer reliable delivery can be considered an unnecessary overhead for low
bit-error links, including fiber, coax, and many twisted-pair copper links. For this reason,
many wired link-layer protocols do not provide a reliable delivery service.

4-Error detection and correction. The link-layer hardware in a receiving node can decide
that a bit in a frame is zero when it was transmitted as a one, and vice versa. Such bit errors
are introduced by signal attenuation and electromagnetic noise. Because there is no need to
forward a datagram that has an error, many link-layer protocols provide a mechanism to
detect such bit errors. This is done by having the transmitting node include error-detection
bits in the frame, and having the receiving node perform an error check. Recall from
previous lectures that the Internet’s transport layer and network layer also provide a limited
form of error detection the Internet checksum. Error detection in the link layer is usually
more sophisticated and is implemented in hardware. Error correction is similar to error
detection, except that a receiver not only detects when bit errors have occurred in the frame
but also determines exactly where in the frame the errors have occurred (and then corrects
these errors).
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Lecture 4 Ethernet

Multiple Access Links and Protocols

• Channel partitioning protocols

Examples: FDM,TDM,CDMA

• Random access protocols

Examples: ALOHA, Slotted ALOHA, Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA)

• Taking-turns protocols
Example: token-passing protocol