Lesson 01 Computer Networks and Internet

1.0 Introduction

In the subject ITE1301 you have learned basic information about computer networks. In this subject we
will cover more detailed information about computer networks. Here you will get an overview of
computer networking and Internet. This week we will discuss the pieces which form the computer
network, without losing sight of the big picture.

As centuries come by, Internet will be the basis for economical, political and personal advancement. The
internet is well known as the information superhighway. Whether you want to find the latest financial
news, browse through library catalogs, exchange information with colleagues, or join in a lively political
debate, the Internet is the tool that will take you beyond telephones, faxes, and isolated computers to a
burgeoning networked information frontier.

The Internet supplements the traditional tools you use to gather information, Data Graphics, News and
correspond with other people. Used skillfully, the Internet shrinks the world and brings information,
expertise, and knowledge on nearly every subject imaginable straight to your computer.

Learning outcome:

After completing this lesson, you would be able to:

Describe Internet, Protocol, Clients, and Servers

Explain the difference between Circuit Switching and Packet Switching

Explain what is an ISP and a Network Backbone

List the networking layers and their main functionalities

Specify milestones in the history of Computer Networking and the Internet

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1.1 What is the Internet?

The Internet, sometimes called simply "the Net," is a worldwide system of computer networks a
network of networks in which users at any one computer can, if they have permission, get information
from any other computer (and sometimes talk directly to users at other computers). It was conceived by
the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. government in 1969 and was first known as
the ARPANET. The original aim was to create a network that would allow users of a research computer
at one university to be able to "talk to" research computers at other universities. A side benefit of
ARPANET's design was that, because messages could be routed or rerouted in more than one direction,
the network could continue to function even if parts of it were destroyed in the event of a military
attack or other disaster.

Today, the Internet is a public, cooperative, and selfsustaining facility accessible to hundreds of millions
of people worldwide. Physically, the Internet uses a portion of the total resources of the currently
existing public telecommunication networks. Technically, what distinguishes the Internet is its use of a
set of protocols called TCP/IP (for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). Two recent
adaptations of Internet technology, the intranet and the extranet, also make use of the TCP/IP protocol.

For many Internet users, electronic mail (email) has practically replaced the Postal Service for short
written transactions. Electronic mail is the most widely used application on the Net. You can also carry
on live "conversations" with other computer users, using Internet Relay Chat (IRC). More recently,
Internet telephony hardware and software allows realtime voice conversations.

The most widely used part of the Internet is the World Wide Web (often abbreviated "WWW" or called
"the Web"). Its outstanding feature is hypertext, a method of instant crossreferencing. In most Web
sites, certain words or phrases appear in text of a different color than the rest; often this text is also
underlined. When you select one of these words or phrases, you will be transferred to the site or page
that is relevant to this word or phrase. Sometimes there are buttons, images, or portions of images that
are "clickable." If you move the pointer over a spot on a Web site and the pointer changes into a hand,
this indicates that you can click and be transferred to another site.

Using the Web, you have access to millions of pages of information. Web browsing is done with a Web
browser, the most popular of which are Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. The
appearance of a particular Web site may vary slightly depending on the browser you use. Also, later
versions of a particular browser are able to render more "bells and whistles" such as animation, virtual
reality, sound, and music files, than earlier versions.

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1.1.1 Internet protocol

What is a protocol?

A protocol defines the format and the order of messages exchanged between two or more
communicating entities, as well as the actions taken on the transmission and/or receipt of a message or
other event.

The Internet Protocol (IP) is the method or protocol by which data is sent from one computer to another
on the Internet. Each computer (known as a host) on the Internet has at least one IP address that
uniquely identifies it from all other computers on the Internet. When you send or receive data (for
example, an email note or a Web page), the message gets divided into little chunks called packets. Each
of these packets contains both the sender's Internet address and the receiver's address. Any packet is
sent first to a gateway computer that understands a small part of the Internet. The gateway computer
reads the destination address and forwards the packet to an adjacent gateway that in turn reads the
destination address and so forth across the Internet until one gateway recognizes the packet as
belonging to a computer within its immediate neighborhood or domain. That gateway then forwards the
packet directly to the computer whose address is specified.

Because a message is divided into a number of packets, each packet can, if necessary, be sent by a
different route across the Internet. Packets can arrive in a different order than the order they were sent
in. The Internet Protocol just delivers them. It's up to another protocol, the Transmission Control
Protocol (TCP) to put them back in the right order.

IP is a connectionless protocol, which means that there is no continuing connection between the end
points that are communicating. Each packet that travels through the Internet is treated as an
independent unit of data without any relation to any other unit of data. (The reason the packets do get
put in the right order is because of TCP, the connectionoriented protocol that keeps track of the packet
sequence in a message.) In the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) communication model, IP is in layer
3, the Networking Layer.

The most widely used version of IP today is Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4). However, IP Version 6
(IPv6) is also beginning to be supported. IPv6 provides for much longer addresses and therefore for the
possibility of many more Internet users. IPv6 includes the capabilities of IPv4 and any server that can
support IPv6 packets can also support IPv4 packets.

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1.2 The Network Edge

In the previous section we discussed the Internet and the networking protocols. We are now going to
look into the components of a computer network. We begin in this section at the edge of a network and
look at the components with which we are most familiar. In the next section we will move from the
network edge to the network core and examine switching and routing in computer networks.

1.2.1 End Systems, Clients and Servers.

End Systems

What we usually refer to as the End Systems are the computers that are connected to the internet. End
Systems can also be referred to as hosts as they run applications programs such as web browser
programs and web server programs.

Clients

A client is an application that functions at one end of the system that accesses a remote service on
another machine usually the Sever.

Servers

A server can be defined as a computer that provides resources to other computers in a network. It runs
server side application for the clients to request from and retrieve. Servers are designed to run specific
server applications such as file servers, database servers, networking servers, etc.

1.2.2 Connection Oriented and connectionless services.

The internet provides two types of services to end system applications: connectionless service and
connection oriented service. A developer creating an Internet application must design the application to
use one of these two services.

Connection Oriented Service

When an application used the connection oriented service, the client program and the server program
send control packets to each other before sending packets with the actual data to be transferred. This
handshaking procedure alerts the client and server, allowing them to prepare for the data packets. Once
the handshaking procedure is completed, a connection is established between the two end systems.

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Connectionless service

There is no handshaking with the Internets connectionless service. When one side of the application
wants to send packets to the other side of the application, the sending program simply send the packets.
Since there is no handshaking procedure before sending the data packets, data can be delivered sooner.
This makes connectionless services ideal for simple transaction oriented applications. But there is no
reliable data transfer so a source never knows for sure which packets have arrived at the destination.

1.3 The Network Core

Having examined the end systems and endend transport service model of the Internet, let us take a
look inside the network. In this section we study the network core. In this section we study the network
core the mesh of routers that interconnect the Internets end systems.

1.3.1 Circuit Switching and Packet Switching

The old telephone system (PSTN) uses circuit switching to transmit voice data whereas VoIP uses packet
switching to do so. The difference in the way these two types of switching work is the thing that made
VoIP so different and successful.

To understand switching, you need to realize that the network in place between two communicating
persons is a complex field of devices and machines, especially if the network is the Internet. Consider a
person in Mauritius having a phone conversation with another person on the other side of the globe, say
in the US. There are a large number of routers, switches and other kinds of devices that take the data
transmitted during the communication from one end to the other.

Switching and routing

Switching and routing are technically two different things, but for the sake of simplicity, let us take
switches and routers (which are devices that make switching and routing respectively) as devices doing
one job: make a link in the connection and forward data from the source to the destination.

Paths or circuits

The important thing to look for in transmitting information over such a complex network is the path or
circuit. The devices making up the path are called nodes. For instance, switches, routers and some other
network devices are nodes.

In circuitswitching, this path is decided upon before the data transmission starts. The system decides on
which route to follow, based on a resourceoptimizing algorithm, and transmission goes according to the
path. For the whole length of the communication session between the two communicating bodies, the
route is dedicated and exclusive, and released only when the session terminates.

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Packets

To be able to understand packetswitching, you need to know what a packet is. The Internet Protocol
(IP), just like many other protocols, breaks data into pieces and wraps the pieces into structures called
packets. Each packet contains, along with the data load, information about the IP address of the source
and the destination nodes, sequence numbers and some other control information. A packet can also be
called a segment or datagram.

Once they reach their destination, the packets are reassembled to make up the original data again. It is
therefore obvious that, to transmit data in packets, it has to be digital data.

In packetswitching, the packets are sent towards the destination irrespective of each other. Each packet
has to find its own route to the destination. There is no predetermined path; the decision as to which
node to hop to in the next step is taken only when a node is reached. Each packet finds its way using the
information it carries, such as the source and destination IP addresses.

As you must have figured it out already, traditional PSTN phone system uses circuit switching while VoIP
uses packet switching.

A brief comparison between Circuit Switching and Packet Switching.

Circuit switching is old and expensive, and it is what PSTN uses. Packet switching is more modern.

When you are making a PSTN call, you are actually renting the lines, with all it implies. See why
international calls are expensive? So if you speak for, say 10 minutes, you pay for ten minutes of
dedicated line. You normally speak only when your correspondent is silent, and vice versa. Taking also
into consideration the amount of time no one speaks, you finally use much less than half of what you
are paying for. With VoIP, you actually can use a network or circuit even if there are other people using
it at the same time. There is no circuit dedication. The cost is shared.

Circuitswitching is more reliable than packetswitching. When you have a circuit dedicated for a session,
you are sure to get all information across. When you use a circuit which is open for other services, then
there is a big possibility of congestion (which is for a network what a traffic jam is for the road), and
hence the delays or even packet loss. This explains the relatively lower quality of VoIP voice compared
to PSTN. But you actually have other protocols giving a helping hand in making packetswitching
techniques to make connections more reliable. An example is the TCP protocol. Since voice is to some
extent tolerant to some packet loss (unless text since a comma lost can mean a big difference), packet
switching is finally ideal for VoIP.

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1.4 ISPs and Internet Backbones

An internet service provider (ISP) provides many services related to connecting to the internet. Many
people have a dialup account with an ISP (America online is one of the largest.) that allows them to
send email, browse web pages, read news, and use other common services.

1.5 History of Computer Networking and Internet

In its infancy, the Internet was originally conceived by the Department of Defense as a way to protect
government communications systems in the event of a military strike. The original network, dubbed
ARPANet (for the Advanced Research Projects Agency that developed it) evolved into a communications
channel among contractors, military personnel, and university researchers who were contributing to
ARPA projects.

The network employed a set of standard protocols to create an effective way for these people to
communicate and share data with each other. ARPAnet's popularity continued to spread among
researchers and in the 1980 the National Science Foundation, whose NSFNet, linked several high speed
computers, took charge of what had come to be known as the Internet. By the late 1980's, thousands of
cooperating networks were participating in the Internet. In 1991, the U.S. High Performance Computing
Act established the NREN (National Research & Education Network). NREN's goal was to develop and
maintain highspeed networks for research and education, and to investigate commercial uses for the
Internet. The rest, as they say, is history in the making. The Internet has been improved through the
developments of such services as Gopher and the World Wide Web. Even though the Internet is
predominantly thought of as a research oriented network, it continues to grow as an informational,
creative, and commercial resource every day and all over the world.

The important milestones of internet

1957: The United States Department of Defense formed a small agency called ARPA (Advanced Research
Projects Agency) to develop military science and technology.

19611965: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) started to research sharing information in
small, phonelinked networks. ARPA is one of their main sponsors.

1966: The first ARPANET plan is unveiled by Larry Roberts of MIT. Packet switching technology is getting
off the ground, and small university networks are beginning to be developed.

1969: The Department of Defense commissions the fledgling ARPAnet for network research.

The first official network nodes were UCLA, Standford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of
Utah. The first node to node message was sent from UCLA to SRI.

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1971: more nodes join the network, bringing the total to 15. These new nodes include Harvard and
NASA.

1973: ARPAnet goes global when the University College of London and Norway's Royal Radar
Establishment join up.

1974: Network intercommunication is becoming more sophisticated; data is now transmitted more
quickly and efficiently with the design of TCP (Transmission Control Program).

1976: UNIX is developed at AT and T; Queen Elizabeth sends out her first email message.

1979: USENET, the mother of all networked discussion groups, is developed.

1982: Internet technology protocols are developed, commonly known as TCP/IP

(Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol). This leads to one of the first definitions of an
"internet" being a connected set of networks.

1984: Number of hosts is now up to 1000, with more being added every day.

1985: The first registered domain is Symbolics.com.

1987: Number of hosts breaks the 10,000 mark.

1988: First largescale Internet worm affects thousands of Internet hosts.

1991: Tim BernersLee develops the World Wide Web.

1993: The World Wide Web's annual growth is now at a staggering 341,634%.

1994: ARPAnet celebrates 25th anniversary.

19951997: RealAudio introduces Internet streaming technology, dialup systems emerge

(America Online, Compuserve), the Internet backbone continues to be strengthened with the addition of
MCI, Microsoft and Netscape fight for WWW browser supremacy, and there are now more than 70,000
mailing lists.

1998present: The Internet continues to experience staggering growth. More people use the Internet to
get connected to others, find information, conduct business, and share information than ever before in
history.

(ref: http://websearch.about.com/od/whatistheinternet/a/historyinternet.htm)

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1.6 Protocol Layers and Their Service Models

It is apparent that the Internet is an extremely complicated system. We have that there are many pieces
to the internet: numerous applications and protocola, various types of end systems and connections
between end systems, routers etc. with this complexity we wonder if we could organize network
architecture. We shall discuss it further in this section.

1.6.1 Layered Architecture

A layered architecture is an architecture in which data moves from one defined level of processing to
another.

The Protocol Layer consists of 5 layers.

Application Layer

Transport Layer

Network Layer

Link Layer

Physical Layer

These layers use different Protocols for example:

Application Layer the Application layer is concerned with providing services on the network, including
file services, print services, email services, and database services, among others. The application layer
provides an interface whereby applications can communicate with the network and it also advertises
the available services to the network.

Transport Layer the Transport layer ensures the reliable delivery of messages to their destination
devices.The term reliable does not mean that the errors cannot occur; instead, it means that if errors
occur, they are detected. If errors such as lost data are detected, the Transport layer either requests
transmission or notifies upper protocols so that they can take corrective actions.

Network Layer the Network layer handles communication with devices on logically separate networks
that are connected to form internetworks. Because internetworks can be large and can be constructed
of different types of networks, the Network layer utilizes routing algorythms that guide packets from
their source to their destination netwroks.

Link Layer the Data Link layer receives messages, called frames, from upper layers. A primary function
of the Data Link layer is to disassemble these frames into bits for transmission and then to reconstruct

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the frames from the bits received. The Data Link layer has other functions as well, such as addressing,
error control, and flow control for a single link between network devices.

Physical Layer although the OSI Physical layer does not the media used, this layer is concerned with all
aspects of transmitting and receiving data on the network media. Specifically the Physical layer is
concerned with transmitting and receiving bits.

1.6.2 Layers, Messages, Segments, Datagrams and Frames

Layers: The OSI, or Open System Interconnection, model defines a networking framework for
implementing protocols in seven layers. Control is passed from one layer to the next, starting at the
application layer in one station, and proceeding to the bottom layer, over the channel to the next
station and back up the hierarchy

Messages: These are data send through the network which carries information.

Segments: this term is used for the combination of application layer message and transport layer header
information.

Datagrams: this term is basically synonymous with packet and is also used to refer to network layer
technologies. It is often used to refer to a message that is sent at a higher level of the OSI reference
model.

Frames: this term is most commonly associated with messages that travel at low levels of the OSI
reference model. A frame gets its name from the fact that it is created by taking higher level packets or
datagrams and framing them with additional header information needed at the lower level.

Summary

You have completed the first lesson of Module 2303: Computer Networks. Now you would be able to
identify various pieces of hardware and software that make up the Internet in particular and computer
networks in general. You will also be able to describe protocol layering and service models, which are
key architectural principles in networking

The next lesson will be on Principles of Network Applications. Before moving to that lesson, check your
success of learning with Quiz 1.

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