Chapter 1

The aim of the course

 The scope of course is covering the area of Data communications.
 Data communications deals with the transmission of signals
in a reliable and efficient manner.
 Data Communications:
• Signal transmission
• transmission media
• Signal encoding
• Interfacing
• Multiplexing

Data Communications, Data Networks, and the Internet

 The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at
one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at
another point.

Contemporary Data Comms

 Trends: Three different forces have consistently driven the
architecture and evolution of data communications and networking
facilities: traffic growth, development of new services, and advances
in technology.
• The objective is produce high speed networks with maximum
capacity, and minimum transmission cost.

A Communications Model
 The key elements of this model are:
• Source : generates data to be transmitted
• Transmitter : converts data into transmittable signals
(Electromagnetic signal)
• Transmission System : carries data from source to destination
(single transmission line or complex
network)
• Receiver : converts received signal into data
• Destination : takes incoming data.

Communications Tasks
Transmission system utilization Addressing
Interfacing Routing
Signal generation Recovery
Synchronization Message formatting
Exchange management Security
Error detection and correction Network management
Flow control Addressing
 Transmission system utilization: need to make efficient use of
 transmission facilities typically shared among a number of
communicating devices (e.g. Multiplexing).
 A device must interface with the transmission system
 once an interface is established, signal generation is required for
communication.
 There must be synchronization between transmitter and receiver, to
determine when a signal begins to arrive and when it ends.
 There is a variety of requirements for communication between two
parties might be collected under the term exchange management.
 Error detection and correction are required in circumstances where
errors cannot be tolerated.
 Flow control is required to assure that the source does not
overwhelm the destination by sending data faster than they can be
processed and absorbed.
 Addressing & routing: so a source system can indicate the identity
of the intended destination, and can choose a specific route through
this network.
 Recovery: allows an interrupted transaction to resume activity at the
point of interruption or to condition prior to the beginning of the
exchange.
 Message formatting: has to do with an agreement between two
parties as to the form of the data to be exchanged or transmitted.
 Network management: capabilities are needed to configure the
system, monitor its status, react to failures and overloads, and plan
intelligently for future growth

Data Communications Model

 Assume a PC user wants to send an email message m to another user.
 The process is modeled as follows:
• user keys in message m comprising bits g buffered in source PC
memory
• input data is transferred to I/O device (transmitter) as sequence of
bits g(t) using voltage shifts
• transmitter converts these into a signal s(t) suitable for transmission
media being used
• whilst transmiting media signal may be impaired, so received signal
r(t) may differ from s(t)
• receiver decodes signal recovering g’(t) as estimate of original g(t)
which is buffered in destination PC memory as bits g’ being the
received message m’

Transmission Medium
 The basic building block of any communications facility is the
transmission line.
 One of the basic choices facing a business user is the transmission
medium. For use within the business premises ‫مبني‬, this choice is
generally completely up to the business. For long_distance
communications, the choice is generally but not always made by the
long distance carrier.
• A long-distance carrier: is a telephone company that provides
connections between local exchanges in different geographic areas.
 In either case, changes in technology are rapidly changing the mix of
media used. The ever increasing capacity of fiber optic channels is
making channel capacity a virtually free resource. However,
switching is now becoming the bottleneck.
 Despite the growth in the capacity and the drop in cost of
transmission facilities, transmission services remain the most costly
component of a communications budget for most businesses. Thus,
the manager needs to be aware of techniques that increase the
efficiency of the use of these facilities, such as multiplexing and
compression
• Multiplexing: refers to the ability of a number of devices
to share a transmission facility.
• Compression: as the name indicates, involves squeezing the data
down so that a lower-capacity, cheaper transmission
facility can be used to meet a given demand.

Local Area Network (LAN)

 The LAN is to be found in virtually all medium- and large-size office
buildings.
 LAN: is a communications network that interconnects a variety of
devices and provides a means for information exchange among those
devices.
 As the number and power of computing devices have grown, so have
the number and capacity of LANs to be found in an office.
 Advances in technology have led to greatly increased capacity and
the concept of integration.
 Integration: means that the customer equipment and networks can
deal simultaneously with voice, data, image, and even video.
 Image and video services impose large demands on wide area
network transmission.
 LAN types: switched LANs, e.g Ethernet, wireless LANs
 Ethernet LAN: which may consist of a single switch with a number
of attached devices, or a number of interconnected switches

Wide Area Networks (WAN)

 Moreover, as LANs become ubiquitous ‫ واسعة االنتشار‬and as their
transmission rates increase, the demands on the wide area networks to
support LAN interconnection have increased the demands on wide
area network capacity and switching.
 Wide area networks generally cover a large geographical area, and
rely at least in part on circuits provided by a common carrier.
 WAN consists of a number of interconnected switching nodes. A
transmission from any one device is routed through these internal
nodes to the specified destination device.
 WANs have been implemented using one of four technologies:
• circuit switching
• packet switching
• frame relay
• Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)

Circuit Switching
 In a circuit-switching network, a dedicated communications path is
established between two stations through the nodes of the network.
That path is a connected sequence of physical links between nodes.
 Data generated by the source station are transmitted along the
dedicated path as rapidly as possible.
 The most common example of circuit switching is the telephone
network

Packet Switching
 A packet-switching network uses a quite different approach, without
need to dedicate ‫ يخصص‬transmission capacity along a path through
the network. Rather, data is sent in a sequence of small chunks, called
packets
 Each packet is passed through the network from node to node along
some path leading from source to destination.
 At each node, the entire packet is received, stored briefly, and then
transmitted to the next node
 Packet-switching networks are commonly used for terminal-to-
computer and computer-to-computer communications.

Frame Relay
 Packet switching was developed at a time when digital long distance
transmission facilities exhibited a relatively high error rate compared
to today’s facilities.
• packet-switching networks were designed with a data rate to the end
user of about 64 kbps.
 With modern high-speed telecommunications systems, this overhead
is unnecessary and counterproductive. It is unnecessary because the
rate of errors has been dramatically lowered.
 Frame relay was developed to take advantage of these high data rates
and low error rates.
 Frame relay networks are designed to operate efficiently at user data
rates of up to 2 Mbps.

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)

 Sometimes referred to as cell relay.
 Evolution of frame relay with little overhead for error control
(By using a fixed packet length, the processing overhead is reduced
even further for ATM compared to frame relay).
 The difference between Frame relay and ATM is that frame relay uses
variable-length packets, called frames.
 ATM uses fixed-length packets, called cells.
 ATM is designed to work in the range of 10s and 100s of Mbps, and
in the Gbps

LAN verse WAN

 LAN WAN
The scope of the LAN is small, Wide area networks generally
typically a single building or a cover a large geographical
cluster of buildings
LAN is owned by the same WANs, this is less often the case,
organization that owns the or at least a significant fraction of
attached devices. the network assets is not owned
The internal data rates of LANs are typically much greater
than those of WANs.
LANs are typically faster and more secure than WANs

The Internet
 The purpose of the Internet, of course, is to interconnect end systems,
called hosts; these include PCs, workstations, servers, mainframes,
and so on.
 Most hosts that use the Internet are connected to a network, such as a
local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN).
These networks are in turn connected by routers.
 Each router attaches to two or more networks. Some hosts, such as
mainframes or servers, connect directly to a router rather than
through a network.
 In essence, the Internet operates as follows.
• A host may send data to another host anywhere on the Internet.
The source host breaks the data to be sent into a sequence of packets,

called IP datagrams or IP packets.

• Each packet includes a unique numeric address of the destination
host. This address is referred to as an IP address,
because the address is carried in an IP packet.
• Based on this destination address, each packet travels through a
series of routers and networks from source to destination.
Each router, as it receives a packet, makes a routing decision and
forwards the packet along its way to the destination.

Internet Elements