Ergonomics
tech guide & how tos..
Many different networks exist, including LANs, MANs and WANs. Numerous protocols are in widespread use in every layer. Here we will take a look at the issues that arise when two or more networks are together to form an internet. Having different networks invariably means having different protocols.
We believe that a variety of different networks (and thus protocols) will always be around, for the following reasons. First of all, the installed base of the different networks is large and growing. Nearly all UNIX shops run TCP/IP. Many large businesses still have mainframes running SNA. DEC is still developing DECnet. Personal computer LANs often use Novell NCP/IPX or AppleTalk. ATM systems are starting to be widespread. Finally, specialized protocols are often used on satellite, cellular, and infrared networks. This trend will continue for years due to the large number of existing networks and because not all vendors perceive it in their interest for their customers to be able to easily migrate to another vendor’s system.
Second, as computers and networks get cheaper, the place where decisions get made moves downward. Many companies have a policy to the effect that purchases costing over a million dollars have to be approved by top management, purchases costing over 100,000 dollars have to be approved by middle management, but purchases under 100,000 dollars can be made by department heads without any higher approval. This can easily lead to the accounting department installing an Ethernet, the engineering department installing a token bus, and the personnel department installing a token ring.
Third, different networks (e.g., ATM and wireless) have radically different technology, so it should not be surprising that as new hardware developments occur, new software will be created to fit the new hardware. For example, the average home now is like the average office ten years ago: it is full of computers that do not talk to one another. In the future, it may be commonplace for the telephone, the television set, and other appliances all to be networked together, so they can be controlled remotely. This new technology will undoubtedly bring new protocols.
As an example of how different networks interact, consider the following example. At most universities, the computer science and electrical engineering departments have their own LANs, often different. In addition, the university computer center often has a mainframe and supercomputer, the former for faculty members in the humanities who do not wish to get into the computer maintenance business, and the latter for physicists who want to crunch numbers. As a consequence of these various networks and facilities, the following scenarios are easy to imagine:
LAN-LAN: A computer scientist downloading a file to engineering.
LAN-WAN: A computer scientist sending mail to a distant physicist.
WAN-WAN: Two poets exchanging sonnets.
LAN-WAN-LAN: Engineers at different universities communicating.
The figure below illustrates these four types of connections as dotted lines. In each case, it is necessary to insert a black box at the junction between two networks, to handle the necessary conversions as packets move from one network to the other.
The name used for the black box connecting two networks depends on the layer that does the work. Some common names are given below (although there is not much agreement on terminology in this area).
Layer 1: Repeaters copy individual bits between cable segments.
Layer 2: Bridges store and forward data link frames between LANs.
Layer 3: Multi-protocol routers forward packets between dissimilar networks.
Layer 4: Transport gateways connect byte streams in the transport layer.
Above 4: Application gateways allow internetworking above layer 4.
For convenience, we will sometimes use the term gateway to mean any device that connects two or more dissimilar networks.
Repeaters are low-Ievel devices that just amplify or regenerate weak signals. They are needed to provide current to drive long cables. In 802.3, for example, the timing properties of the MAC protocol allow cables up to 2.5 km, but the transceiver chips can only provide enough power to drive 500 meters. The solution is to use repeaters to extend the cable length where that is desired.
Unlike repeaters, which copy the bits as they arrive, bridges are store-and-forward devices. A bridge accepts an entire frame and passes it up to the data link layer where the checksum is verified. Then the frame is sent down to the physical layer for forwarding on a different network. Bridges can make minor changes to the frame before forwarding it, such as adding or deleting some fields from the frame header. Since they are data link layer devices, they do not deal with headers at layer 3 and above and cannot make changes or decisions that depend on them.
Multi-protocol routers are conceptually similar to bridges, except that they are found in the network layer. They just take incoming packets from one line and forward them on another, just as all routers do, but the lines may belong to different networks and use different protocols (e.g., IP, IPX, and the OSI connectionless packet protocol, CLNP). Like all routers, multi-protocol routers operate at the level of the network layer.
Transport gateways make a connection between two networks at the transport layer.
Finally, application gateways connect two parts of an application in the application layer. For example, to send mail from an Internet machine using the Internet mail format to an ISO MOTIS mailbox, one could send the message to a mail gateway. The mail gateway would unpack the message, convert it to MOTIS format, and then forward it on the second network using the network and transport protocols used there.
When a gateway is between two WANs run by different organizations, possibly in different countries, the joint operation of one workstation-class machine may not be practical. To eliminate these problems, a slightly different approach can be taken. The gateway is effectively ripped apart in the middle and the two parts are connected with a wire. Each of the halves is called a half-gateway and each one is owned and operated by one of the network operators. The whole problem of gatewaying then reduces to agreeing to a common protocol to use on the wire, one that is neutral and does not favor either party. The figure below shows both full and half-gateways. Either kind can be used in any layer (e.g., half-bridges also exist).
That all said, the situation is murkier in practice than it is in theory. Many devices in the market combine bridge and router functionality. The key property of a pure bridge is that it examines data link layer frame headers and does not inspect or modify the network layer packets inside the frames. A bridge cannot tell and does not care whether the frame it is forwarding from an 802.x LAN to an 802.y contains an IP, IPX, or CLNP packet in the payload field.
A router, in contrast, knows very well whether it is an IP router, an IPX router, a CLNP router, or all three combined. It examines these headers and makes decisions based on the addresses found there. On the other hand, when a pure router hands off a packet to the data link layer, it does not know or care whether it will be carried in an Ethernet frame or a token ring frame. That is the data link layer's responsibility.
The confusion in the industry comes from two sources. First, functionally, bridges and routers are not all that different. They each accept incoming PDUs (Protocol Data Units), examine some header fields, and make decisions about where to send the PDUs based on header information and internal tables.
Second, many commercial products are sold under the wrong label or combine the functionality of both bridges and routers. For example, source routing bridges are not really bridges at all, since they involve a protocol layer above the data link layer to do their job.
Networks can differ in many ways. The table below lists some of the differences that can occur in the network layer. It is these differences that make internetworking more difficult than operating within a single network.
| Item | Some Possibilities |
|---|---|
| Service offered | Connection-oriented versus connectionless |
| Protocols | IP, IPX, CLNP, AppleTalk, DECnet, etc. |
| Addressing | Flat (802) versus hierarchical (IP) |
| Multicasting | Present or absent (also broadcasting) |
| Packet size | Every network has its own maximum |
| Quality of service | May be present or absent; many different kinds |
| Error handling | Reliable, ordered, and unordered delivery |
| Flow control | Sliding window, rate control, other, or none |
| Congestion control | Leaky bucket, choke packets, etc. |
| Security | Privacy rules, encryption, etc. |
| Parameters | Different timeouts, flow specifications, etc. |
| Accounting | By connect time, by packet, by byte, or not at all. |
When packets sent by a source on one network must transit one or more foreign networks before reaching the destination network (which also may be different from the source network), many problems can occur at the interfaces between networks. To start with, when packets from a connection-oriented network must transit a connectionless one, they may be reordered, something the sender does not expect and the receiver is not prepared to deal with. Protocol conversions will often be needed, which can be difficult if the required functionality cannot be expressed. Address conversions will also be needed, which may require some kind of directory system. Passing multicast packets through a network that does not support multicasting requires generating separate packets for each destination.
The differing maximum packet size used by different networks is a major headache. How do you pass an 8000 byte packet through a network whose maximum size is 1500 bytes? Differing qualities of service is an issue when a packet that has real-time delivery constraints passes through a network that does not offer any real-time guarantees.
Error, flow, and congestion control frequently differ among different networks. If the source and destination both expect all packets to be delivered in sequence without error, yet an intermediate network just discards packets whenever it smells congestion on the horizon, or packets can wander around aimlessly for a while and then suddenly emerge and be delivered, many applications will break. Different security mechanisms, parameter settings, and accounting rules, and even national privacy laws also can cause problems.
Two styles of internetworking are common –
Let us examine these two.
In the concatenated virtual circuit model, shown below, a connection to a host in a distant network is set up in a way similar to the way connections are normally established. The subnet sees that the destination is remote and builds a virtual circuit to the router nearest the destination network. Then it constructs a virtual circuit from that router to an external "gateway" (multi-protocol router). This gateway records the existence of the virtual circuit in its tables and proceeds to build another virtual circuit to a router in the next subnet. This process continues until the destination host has been reached.
Once data packets begin flowing along the path, each gateway relays incoming packets, converting between packet formats and virtual circuit numbers as needed. Clearly, all data packets must traverse the same sequence of gateways, and thus arrive in order.
The essential feature of this approach is that a sequence of virtual circuits is set up from the source through one or more gateways to the destination. Each gateway maintains tables telling which virtual circuits pass through it, where they are to be routed, and what the new virtual circuit number is.
Although the figure above shows the connection made with a full gateway, it could equally well be done with half - gateways.
This scheme works best when all the networks have roughly the same properties. For example, if all of them guarantee reliable delivery of network layer packets, then barring a crash somewhere along the route, the flow from source to destination will also be reliable. Similarly, if none of them guarantee reliable delivery, then the concatenation of the virtual circuits is not reliable either. On the other hand, if the source machine is on a network that does guarantee reliable delivery, but one of the intermediate networks can lose packets, the concatenation has fundamentally changed the nature of the service.
Concatenated virtual circuits are also common in the transport layer. In particular, it is possible to build a bit pipe using, say, OSI, which terminates in a gateway. and have a TCP connection go from the gateway to the next gateway. In this manner, an end-to-end virtual circuit can be built spanning different networks and protocols.
The concatenated virtual circuit model has essentially the same advantages as using virtual circuits within a single subnet - buffers can be reserved in advance, sequencing can be guaranteed, short headers can be used, and the troubles caused by delayed duplicate packets can be avoided.
It also has the same disadvantages - table space required in the routers for each open connection, no alternate routing to avoid congested areas, and vulnerability to router failures along the path. It also has the disadvantage of being difficult, if not impossible, to implement if one of the networks involved is an unreliable datagram network.
The second inter-network model is the datagram model, shown in figure below. In this model, the only service the network layer offers to the transport layer is the ability to inject datagrams into the subnet and hope for the best. There is no notion of a virtual circuit at all in the network layer, let alone a concatenation of them. This model does not require all packets belonging to one connection to traverse the same sequence of gateways. In the figure below datagrams from host 1 to host 2 are shown taking different routes through the inter-network.
A routing decision is made separately for each packet, possibly depending on the traffic at the moment the packet is sent. This strategy can use multiple routes and thus achieve a higher bandwidth than the concatenated virtual circuit model. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that the packets arrive at the destination in order, if at all they all arrive.
The properties of the datagram approach to internetworking are the same as those of datagram subnets - more potential for congestion, but also more potential for adapting to it, robustness in the face of router failures, and longer headers needed. Various adaptive routing algorithms are possible in an Internet, just as they are within a single datagram network.
A major advantage of the datagram approach to internetworking is that it can be used over subnets that do not use virtual circuits inside. Many LANs, mobile networks (e.g., aircraft and naval fleets), and even some WANs fall into this category. When an internet includes one of these, serious problems occur if the internetworking strategy is based on virtual circuits.
The model shown above is not quite as simple as it looks. For one thing, if each network has its own network layer protocol, it is not possible for a packet from one network to transit another one. One could imagine the multi-protocol routers actually trying to translate from one format to another, but unless the two formats are close relatives with the same information fields, such conversions will always be incomplete and often doomed to failure. For this reason, conversion is rarely attempted.
A second, and more serious problem, is addressing. Imagine a simple case: a host on the Internet is trying to send an IP packet to a host on an adjoining OSI network. The OSI datagram protocol, CLNP, was based on IP and is close enough to it that a conversion might well work. The trouble is that IP packets all carry the 32-bit Internet address of the destination host in a header field. OSI hosts do not have 32-bit Internet addresses. They use decimal addresses similar to telephone numbers.
To make it possible for the multi-protocol router to convert between formats, someone would have to assign a 32-bit Internet address to each OSI host. Taken to the limit, this approach would mean assigning an Internet address to every machine in the world that an Internet host might want to talk to. It would also mean assigning an OSI address to every machine in the world that an OSI host might want to talk to. The same problem occurs with every other address space (SNA, AppleTalk, etc.). The problems here are insurmountable. In addition someone would have to maintain a database mapping everything to everything.
Another idea is to design a universal "internet" packet and have all routers recognize it. This approach is, in fact, what IP is - a packet designed to be carried through many networks. The only problem is that IPX, CLNP, and other "universal” packets exist too, making all of them less than universal. Getting everybody to agree to a single format is a big issue.
Handling the general case of making two different networks inter-work is exceedingly difficult. However, there is a common special case that is manageable. This case is where the source and destination hosts are on the same type of network, but there is a different network in between. As an example, think of an international bank with a TCP/IP based Ethernet in Paris, a TCP/IP based Ethernet in London, and a PTT WAN in between, as shown in figure below.
The solution to this problem is a technique called tunneling. To send an IP packet to host 2, host 1 constructs the packet containing the IP address of host 2, inserts it into an Ethernet frame addressed to the Paris multi-protocol router, and puts it on the Ethernet. When the multi-protocol router gets the frame, it removes the IP packet, inserts it in the payload field of the WAN network layer packet, and addresses the latter to the WAN address of the London multi-protocol router. When it gets there, the London router removes the IP packet and sends it to host 2 inside an Ethernet frame.
The WAN can be seen as a big tunnel extending from one multi-protocol router to the other. The IP packet just travels from one end of the tunnel to other, snug in its nice box. It does not have to worry about dealing with the WAN at all. Neither do the hosts on either Ethernet. Only the multi-protocol router has to understand IP and WAN packets. In effect, the entire distance from the middle of one multi-protocol router to the middle of the other acts like a serial line.
An analogy may make tunneling clearer. Consider a person driving a car from Paris to London. Within France, the car moves under its own power, but when it hits the English Channel, it is loaded into a high - speed train and transported to England through the Channel. Effectively, the car is being carried as freight, as depicted in figure below.
At the far end, the car is let loose on the English roads and once again continues to move under its own power. Tunneling of packets through a foreign network works the same way.
Routing through an internetwork is similar to routing within a single subnet, but with some added complications. Consider, for example, the internetwork of Fig. (a) below, in which five networks are connected by six multiprotocol routers. Making a graph model of this situation is complicated by the fact that every multiprotocol router can directly access (i.e., send packets to) every other router connected to any network to which it is connected. For example, B in Fig. (a) can directly access A and C via network 2 and also D via network 3. This leads to the graph of Fig. (b).
Once the graph has been constructed, known routing algorithms, such as the distance vector and link state algorithms, can be applied to the set of multiprotocol routers.
This gives a two - level routing algorithm:
In fact, since each network is independent, they may all use different algorithms. Because each network in an internetwork is independent of all the others, it is often referred to as an Autonomous System (AS).
A typical internet packet starts out on its LAN addressed to the local multiprotocol router (in the MAC layer header). After it gets there, the network layer code decides which multiprotocol router to forward the packet to, using its own routing tables. If that router can be reached using the packet's native network protocol, it is forwarded there directly. Otherwise it is tunneled there, encapsulated in the protocol required by the intervening network. This process is repeated until the packet reaches the destination network.
One of the differences between internetwork routing and intra-network routing is that internetwork routing often requires crossing international boundaries. Various laws suddenly come into play, such as Sweden's strict privacy laws about exporting personal data about Swedish citizens from Sweden. Another example is the Canadian law saying that data traffic originating in Canada and ending in Canada may not leave the country. This law means that traffic from Windsor, Ontario to Vancouver may not be routed via nearby Detroit.
Another difference between interior and exterior routing is the cost. Within a single network, a single charging algorithm normally applies. However, different networks may be under different managements, and one route may be less expensive than another. Similarly, the quality of service offered by different networks may be different, and this may be a reason to choose one route over another.
In a large internetwork, choosing the best route may be a time - consuming operation. This problem is dealt with by precomputing routes for popular (source, destination) pairs and storing them in a database to be consulted at route selection time.
Each network imposes some maximum size on its packets. These limits have various causes, among them:
The result of all these factors is that the network designers are not free to choose any maximum packet size they wish. Maximum payloads range from 48 bytes (ATM cells) to 65,515 bytes (IP packets), although the payload size in higher layers is often larger.
An obvious problem appears when a large packet wants to travel through a network whose maximum packet size is too small. One solution is to make sure the problem does not occur in the first place. In other words, the internet should use a routing algorithm that avoids sending packets through networks that cannot handle them. However, this solution is no solution at all. What happens if the original source packet is too large to be handled by the destination network? The routing algorithm can hardly bypass the destination.
Basically, the only solution to the problem is to allow gateways to break packets up into fragments, sending each fragment as a separate internet packet.
However, converting a large object into small fragments is considerably easier than the reverse process. Packet-switching networks, have trouble putting the fragments back together again.
Two opposing strategies exist for recombining the fragments back into the original packet.
The first strategy is to make fragmentation caused by a "small-packet" network, transparent to any subsequent networks through which the packet must pass on its way to the ultimate destination. This option is shown in Fig.(a) above. When an oversized packet arrives at a gateway, the gateway breaks it up into fragments. Each fragment is addressed to the same exit gateway, where the pieces are recombined. In this way passage through the small-packet network has been made transparent. Subsequent networks are not even aware that fragmentation has occurred.
ATM networks, for example, have special hardware to provide transparent fragmentation of packets into cells and then reassembly of cells into packets. In the ATM world, fragmentation is called segmentation; the concept is the same, but some of the details are different.
Transparent fragmentation is simple but has some problems. These problems are:
The exit gateway must know when it has received all the pieces, so that either a count field or an "end of packet" bit must be included in each packet.
All packets must exit via the same gateway. By not allowing some fragments to follow one route to the ultimate destination, and other fragments a disjoint route, some performance may be lost.
The overhead required to repeatedly reassemble and then re-fragment a large packet passing through a series of small - packet networks is high.
The other fragmentation strategy is to refrain from recombining fragments at any intermediate gateways. Once a packet has been fragmented, each fragment is treated as though it were an original packet. All fragments are passed through the exit gateway (or gateways), as shown in Fig. (b). Recombination occurs only at the destination host.
Non-transparent fragmentation also has some problems. For example, it requires every host to be able to do reassembly. Yet another problem is that when a large packet is fragmented the total overhead increases, because each fragment must have a header. Whereas in the first method this overhead disappears as soon as the small - packet network is exited, in this method the overhead remains for the rest of the journey. An advantage of this method, however, is that multiple exit gateways can now be used and higher performance can be achieved.
When a packet is fragmented, the fragments must be numbered in such a way that the original data stream can be reconstructed. One way of numbering the fragments is to use a tree. If packet 0 must be split up, the pieces are called 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, etc. If these fragments themselves must be fragmented later on, the pieces are numbered 0.0.0, 0.0.1, 0.0.2, . . ., 0.1.0, 0.1.1, 0.1.2, etc. If enough fields have been reserved in the header for the worst case and no duplicates are generated anywhere, this scheme is sufficient to ensure that all the pieces can be correctly reassembled at the destination, no matter what order they arrive in.
However, if even one network loses or discards packets, there is a need for end-to-end retransmissions, with unfortunate effects for the numbering system. Suppose that a 1024-bit packet is initially fragmented into four equal - sized fragments, 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3. Fragment 0.1 is lost, but the other parts arrive at the destination. Eventually, the source times out and re-transmits the original packet again. This time the route taken passes through a network with a 512-bit limit, so two fragments are generated. When the new fragment 0.1 arrives at the destination, the receiver will think that all four pieces are now accounted for and reconstruct the packet incorrectly.
A completely different (and better) numbering system is for the internetwork protocol to define an elementary fragment size small enough that the elementary fragment can pass through every network. When a packet is fragmented, all the pieces are equal to the elementary fragment size except the last one, which may be shorter.
This approach requires two sequence fields in the internet header: the original packet number, and the fragment number.
The ability to connect any computer, anywhere, to any other computer, anywhere, is a mixed blessing. For individuals at home, wandering around the Internet is lots of fun. For corporate security managers, it is a nightmare. Most companies have large amounts of confidential information online - trade secrets, product development plans, marketing strategies, financial analysis, etc. Disclosure of this information to a competitor could have dire consequences.
In addition to the danger of information leaking out, there is also a danger of information leaking in. In particular, viruses, worms, and other digital pests can breach security, destroy valuable data, and waste large amounts of administrators’ time trying to clean up the mess they leave. Often they are imported by careless employees who want to play some nifty new game.
Consequently, mechanisms are needed to keep "good" bits in and "bad" out. One method is to use encryption. This approach protects data in transmit between secure sites. However, encryption does nothing to keep digital pests and hackers out. To accomplish this goal, we need to look at firewalls.
Firewalls are just a modern adaptation of that old medieval security standby: digging a deep moat around your castle. This design forced everyone entering or leaving the castle to pass over a single drawbridge, where they could be inspected by the I/O police. With networks, the same trick is possible: a company can have many LANs connected in arbitrary ways, but all traffic to or from the company is forced through an electronic drawbridge (firewall), as shown in figure above.
The firewall in this configuration has two components: two routers that do packet filtering and an application gateway. Simpler configurations also exist, but the advantage of this design is that every packet must transit two filters and an application gateway to go in or out. No other route exists.
Each packet filter is a standard router equipped with some extra functionality. The extra functionality allows every incoming or outgoing packet to be inspected. Packets meeting some criterion are forwarded normally. Those that fail the test are dropped.
In figure above, most likely the packet filter on the inside LAN checks outgoing packets and the one on the outside LAN checks incoming packets. Packets crossing the first hurdle go to the application gateway for further examination. The point of putting the two packet filters on different LANs is to ensure that no packet gets in or out without having to pass through the application gateway: there is no path around it.
Packet filters are typically driven by tables configured by the system administrator. These tables list sources and destinations that are acceptable, sources and destinations that are blocked, and default rules about what to do with packets coming from or going to other machines.
In the common case of a UNIX setting, a source or destination consists of an IP address and a port. Ports indicate which service is desired. For example, port 23 is for Telnet, port 79 is for Finger, and port 119 is for USENET news. A company could block incoming packets for all IP addresses combined with one of these ports. In this way, no one outside the company could log in via Telnet, or look up people using the Finger daemon. Furthermore, the company would be spared from having employees who spend all day reading USENET news.
Blocking outgoing packets is trickier because although most sites stick to the standard port naming conventions, they are not forced to do so. Furthermore, for important services, such as FTP (File Transfer Protocol), port numbers are assigned dynamically. In addition, although blocking TCP connections is difficult, blocking UDP packets is even harder because so little is known before hand about what they will do. Many packet filters simply ban UDP traffic altogether.
The second half of the firewall mechanism is the application gateway. Rather than just looking at raw packets, the gateway operates at the application level. A mail gateway, for example, can be set up to examine each message going in or coming out. For each one it makes a decision to transmit or discard it based on header fields, message size, or even the content (e.g., at a military installation, the presence of words like "nuclear” or “bomb" might cause some special action to be taken).
Installations are free to set up one or more application gateways for specific applications, but it is not uncommon for suspicious organizations to permit email in and out, and perhaps use of the World Wide Web, but ban everything else as too dicey. Combined with encryption and packet filtering, this arrangement offers a limited amount of security at the cost of some inconvenience.
One final note concerns wireless communication and firewalls. It is easy to design a system that is logically completely secure, but which, in practice, leaks like a sieve. This situation can occur if some of the machines are wireless and use radio communication, which passes right over the firewall in both directions.
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Rajeev Kumar is the primary author of How2Lab. He is a B.Tech. from IIT Kanpur with several years of experience in IT education and Software development. He has taught a wide spectrum of people including fresh young talents, students of premier engineering colleges & management institutes, and IT professionals.
Rajeev has founded Computer Solutions & Web Services Worldwide. He has hands-on experience of building variety of websites and business applications, that include - SaaS based erp & e-commerce systems, and cloud deployed operations management software for health-care, manufacturing and other industries.