Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept.

of CSE, UIU

CHAPTER 2
Application Layer

2.1 Principles of Network Applications

2.1.1 Network Application Architectures
2.1.2 Processes Communicating
2.1.3 Transport Services Available to Applications
2.1.4 Transport Services Provided by the Internet
2.1.5 Application-Layer Protocols

2.2 The Web and HTTP

2.2.1 Overview of HTTP
2.2.2 Non-Persistent and Persistent Connections
2.2.3 HTTP Message Format

2.4 Electronic Mail in the Internet

2.4.1 SMTP
2.4.2 Comparison with HTTP
2.4.4 Mail Access Protocols

2.5 DNS—The Internet's Directory Service

2.5.1 Services Provided by DNS
2.5.2 Overview of How DNS Works

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

Section 2.1 – Principles of Network Applications

 Client-server architecture vs. Peer-to-peer architecture

 Process Communication – Client Process and server Process

 Transport services provided by the Internet – TCP and UDP

 What an Application layer protocol defines? (4 things)

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

Knowledge Test # 1
Q.1 Write down 3 (Three) distinct differences between Client-server and Peer-to-peer architecture.
Client-Server Peer-to-peer

Q.2 What information is used by a process running on one host to identify a process running on
another host?

Q.3 Suppose you wanted to do a transaction from a remote client to a server as fast as possible.
Would you use UDP or TCP? Why?

Q.4 List the four broad classes of services that a transport protocol can provide. For each of the
service classes, indicate if either UDP or TCP (or both) provides such a service. (Hints: Data loss,
Timing, Bandwidth and Security)

Q.5 What are the four things defined in an application layer protocol?

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

Section 2.2 – The Web and HTTP

 Web page consists of Objects

 HTTP Connections – Non-persistent and Persistent

 HTTP message types – HTTP request and HTTP response

 Exercise 1: Suppose, a client (web browser) requests an html file, which contains 8 .jpg images
and 2 .mov video files. How many requests will be sent by the browser? Which one of i) non-
persistent and ii) persistent HTTP will take less time to transfer the files. Why?

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

Knowledge Test # 2
Q.1 True or false?
a. A user requests a Web page that consists of some text and three images. For this page, the client will send
one request message and receive four response messages.
b. Two distinct Web pages (for example, www.mit.edu/research.html and www.mit.edu/students. html) can
be sent over the same persistent connection.
c. With non-persistent connections between browser and origin server, it is possible for a single TCP
segment to carry two distinct HTTP request messages.
d. The Date: header in the HTTP response message indicates when the object in the response was last
modified.
e. HTTP response messages never have an empty message body.

Q.2 What are the message types in HTTP? Describe different fields of the messages.

Q.3 The HTTP GET message

Consider the figure below, where a client is sending an HTTP GET message to a web server,
gaia.cs.umass.edu.

Suppose the client-to-server HTTP GET message is the following:

GET /kurose_ross/interactive/quotation4.htm HTTP/1.1
Host: gaia.cs.umass.edu
Accept: text/plain, text/html, text/xml, image/gif, image/jpeg,
audio/basic, audio/mp4, video/wmv, video/mp4, application/*, */*
Accept-Language: en-us, en-gb;q=0.6, en;q=0.9, fr, fr-ch, zh, cs
If-Modified-Since: Fri, 08 Feb 2013 12:09:35 EST
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML,
like Gecko) Chrome/17.0.963.56 Safari/535.11
Answer the following questions:
 What is the name of the file that is being retrieved in this GET message?
 What version of HTTP is the client running?
 What formats of text, images, audio, and video does the client browser prefer to receive?
 What languages is the browser indicating that it is willing to accept?
 Does the client already have a (possibly out-of-date) copy of the requested file? Explain.
 What is the type of client browser and the client's operating system?

Q.4 The HTTP REPLY message

Describe the following HTTP reply message:

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

Section 2.4 – Electronic Mail in the Internet

 Components of an E-mail System

 How an E-mail system works? (Working Steps, Protocols)

 Exercise 2: Suppose Alice, with a Web-based e-mail account (such as Hotmail or gmail), sends a
message to Bob, who accesses his mail from his mail server using POP3. Discuss how the
message gets from Alice's host to Bob's host. Be sure to list the series of application-layer
protocols that are used to move the message between the two hosts. From a user's perspective,
what is the difference between the download-and-delete mode and the download-and-keep
mode in POP3?

 Exercise 3:
Figure on the left shows how Bob and Alice can
communicate to each other through email. Suppose
SMTP is used for the email transfer. Bob has sent Alice
an email. We know that Alice has not checked this mail
(assume Alice’s PC is off till now). Where is this email
currently stored?
i. Email Server 1 ii. Email Server 2
iii. Email Server 1 or 2 iv. Bob’s PC
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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

Section 2.5 – Domain Name System (DNS)

 Services provided by DNS

 How DNS works?

 DNS hierarchy

 Exercise 4: Draw a diagram (containing different types/levels of DNS servers) to show the steps
of an iterated query for a DNS request (Suppose there is no DNS cache) to get the name-to-IP-
address mapping from a client PC connected to Internet.

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

 DNS records

 Exercise 5: Suppose you have a Host C, a local name server L, and authoritative name servers
Aroot, Acom, and Agoogle.com, where the naming convention Ax means that the name server
knows about the name zone x. Ax is a variable and NOT a hostname. Aroot is a root name server
known to L, with IP address 198.41.0.4. Assume that all name servers initially have nothing in their
caches.
a) Using the resource records below, provide the hostnames and IP addresses for Acom and
Agoogle.com
b) List the sequence of DNS queries and corresponding resource records that are exchanged
when C wants to lookup the address for www.google.com. When a name server Ax contacts Ay, please
specify the IP address for Ay. The following represents the level of detail we are looking for:
i) Ax contacts Ay at 1.2.3.4 to resolve www.foobar.com
ii) Ay returns resource records R1, R2, : : : , Rn.
c) Client C performs a lookup for mail.google.com immediately after the previous request. Assume
all records have long TTLs. List the sequence of DNS queries and corresponding resource records
exchanged during the lookup.

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Study Guide & Workbook – CSE 323 – Computer Networks Dept. of CSE, UIU

Knowledge Test # 3
Q.1 What are the 3 (Three) main components of an E-mail system? Describe the steps how an e-
mail system works.

Q.2 What are the protocols used as mail forwarding protocol and mail access protocols?

Q.3 Why Domain Name System (DNS) is used? What are the different types of DNS servers? What
are the problems of using a centralized DNS server in Internet?

Q.4
a. You want to find out what the authoritative name servers are for the domain “kth.se.”
Describe the DNS query you use to get the answer.
b. You want to find out what the incoming mail server is for the domain “ict.kth.se.”
Describe the DNS query you use to get the answer.
c. The domain “ict.kth.se.” is a subdomain of “kth.se.” When the name server (or servers) are
set up for these two domains, it is possible to use delegation. Explain how the name
server(s) are configured if delegation is used, compared to the case if there is no
delegation.
d. Describe how you could use DNS queries to find out whether there is delegation in place
for a certain domain (for example, to see if there is a delegation from “kth.se.” to
“ict.kth.se.”).

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