Assignment 02

R1. List five nonproprietary Internet applications and the application-layer protocols that they use.

R2. What is the difference between network architecture and application architecture?

R3. For a communication session between a pair of processes, which process is the client and
which is the server?

R4. For a P2P file-sharing application, do you agree with the statement, “There is no notion of
client and server sides of a communication session”? Why or why not?

R5. What information is used by a process running on one host to identify a process running on
another host?

R6. 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?

R7. Referring to Figure 2.4 , we see that none of the applications listed in Figure 2.4 requires

both no data loss and timing. Can you conceive of an application that requires no data loss and

that is also highly time-sensitive?

R8. 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.

R9. Recall that TCP can be enhanced with SSL to provide process-to-process security services,

including encryption. Does SSL operate at the transport layer or the application layer? If the

application developer wants TCP to be enhanced with SSL, what does the developer have to

do?

R10. What is meant by a handshaking protocol?

R11. Why do HTTP, SMTP, and POP3 run on top of TCP rather than on UDP?
R12. Consider an e-commerce site that wants to keep a purchase record for each of its
customers. Describe how this can be done with cookies.
R13. Describe how Web caching can reduce the delay in receiving a requested object. Will Web
caching reduce the delay for all objects requested by a user or for only some of the objects?
SECTION 2.5
SECTION 2.6
Why?
R14. Telnet into a Web server and send a multiline request message. Include in the request
message the If-modified-since: header line to force a response message with the 304
Not Modified status code.
R15. List several popular messaging apps. Do they use the same protocols as SMS?
R16. 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.
R17. Print out the header of an e-mail message you have recently received. How many
Received: header lines are there? Analyze each of the header lines in the message.
R18. From a user’s perspective, what is the difference between the download-and-delete mode
and the download-and-keep mode in POP3?
R19. Is it possible for an organization’s Web server and mail server to have exactly the same
alias for a hostname (for example, foo.com )? What would be the type for the RR that contains
the hostname of the mail server?
R20. Look over your received e-mails, and examine the header of a message sent from a user
with a .edu e-mail address. Is it possible to determine from the header the IP address of the host
from which the message was sent? Do the same for a message sent from a Gmail account.

R21. In BitTorrent, suppose Alice provides chunks to Bob throughout a 30-second interval. Will
Bob necessarily return the favor and provide chunks to Alice in this same interval? Why or why
not?
R22. Consider a new peer Alice that joins BitTorrent without possessing any chunks. Without
any chunks, she cannot become a top-four uploader for any of the other peers, since she has
nothing to upload. How then will Alice get her first chunk?
R23. What is an overlay network? Does it include routers? What are the edges in the overlay
network?

R24. CDNs typically adopt one of two different server placement philosophies. Name and briefly
describe them.
R25. Besides network-related considerations such as delay, loss, and bandwidth performance,
there are other important factors that go into designing a CDN server selection strategy. What
are they?

R26. In Section 2.7, the UDP server described needed only one socket, whereas the TCP server
needed two sockets. Why? If the TCP server were to support n simultaneous connections, each
from a different client host, how many sockets would the TCP server need?
R27. For the client-server application over TCP described in Section 2.7 , why must the server
program be executed before the client program? For the client-server application over UDP, why
may the client program be executed before the server program?

P2. SMS, iMessage, and WhatsApp are all smartphone real-time messaging
systems. After
doing some research on the Internet, for each of these systems write one
paragraph about the
protocols they use. Then write a paragraph explaining how they differ.

P3. Consider an HTTP client that wants to retrieve a Web document at a

given URL. The IP
address of the HTTP server is initially unknown. What transport and
application-layer protocols
besides HTTP are needed in this scenario?

P7. Suppose within your Web browser you click on a link to obtain a Web page. The IP address

for the associated URL is not cached in your local host, so a DNS lookup is necessary to obtain

the IP address. Suppose that n DNS servers are visited before your host receives the IP address

from DNS; the successive visits incur an RTT of Further suppose that the Web

page associated with the link contains exactly one object, consisting of a small amount of HTML

text. Let RTT denote the RTT between the local host and the server containing the object.
Assuming zero transmission time of the object, how much time elapses from when the client

clicks on the link until the client receives the object?

P8. Referring to Problem P7, suppose the HTML file references eight very small objects on the

same server. Neglecting transmission times, how much time elapses with

a. Non-persistent HTTP with no parallel TCP connections?

b. Non-persistent HTTP with the browser configured for 5 parallel connections?

c. Persistent HTTP?

P12. Write a simple TCP program for a server that accepts lines of input from a client and prints

the lines onto the server’s standard output. (You can do this by modifying the TCPServer.py

program in the text.) Compile and execute your program. On any other machine that contains a

Web browser, set the proxy server in the browser to the host that is running your server

program; also configure the port number appropriately. Your browser should now send its GET

request messages to your server, and your server should display the messages on its standard

output. Use this platform to determine whether your browser generates conditional GET

messages for objects that are locally cached.

P13. What is the difference between MAIL FROM : in SMTP and From : in the mail message

itself?

P14. How does SMTP mark the end of a message body? How about HTTP? Can HTTP use the

same method as SMTP to mark the end of a message body? Explain.

P15. Read RFC 5321 for SMTP. What does MTA stand for? Consider the following received

spam e-mail (modified from a real spam e-mail). Assuming only the originator of this spam e-mail

is malicious and all other hosts are honest, identify the malacious host that has generated this

spam e-mail
P28. Install and compile the Python programs TCPClient and UDPClient on
one host and
TCPServer and UDPServer on another host.
a. Suppose you run TCPClient before you run TCPServer. What happens?
Why?
b. Suppose you run UDPClient before you run UDPServer. What happens?
Why?
c. What happens if you use different port numbers for the client and
server sides?
P29. Suppose that in UDPClient.py, after we create the socket, we add
the line:
clientSocket.bind((’’, 5432))
Will it become necessary to change UDPServer.py? What are the port
numbers for the sockets
in UDPClient and UDPServer? What were they before making this change?
P30. Can you configure your browser to open multiple simultaneous
connections to a Web site?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a large number of
simultaneous TCP
connections?
P31. We have seen that Internet TCP sockets treat the data being sent as
a byte stream but
UDP sockets recognize message boundaries. What are one advantage and one
disadvantage of
byte-oriented API versus having the API explicitly recognize and
preserve application-defined
message boundaries?
P32. What is the Apache Web server? How much does it cost? What
functionality does it
currently have? You may want to look at Wikipedia to answer this question.