Wireshark Lab: 04

TCP
Computer Network Lab Name Email

Teacher Assistant Numeer Qadri [email protected]

Wireshark Lab:
TCP v8.0
Supplement to Computer Networking: A Top -Down
Approach, 8th ed., J.F. Kurose and K.W. Ross

“Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me

and I understand.” Chinese proverb

© 2005-2020, J.F Kurose and K.W. Ross, Al l Rights Reserved

In this lab, we’ll investigate the behavior of the celebrated TCP protocol in detail.
We’ll do so by analyzing a trace of the TCP segments sent and received in
transferring a 150KB file (containing the text of Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland) from your computer to a remote server. We’ll study TCP’s use of
sequence and acknowledgement numbers for providing reliable data transfer; we’ll
see TCP’s congestion control algorithm – slow start and congestion avoidance – in
action; and we’ll look at TCP’s receiver-advertised flow control mechanism.
We’ll also briefly consider TCP connection setup and we’ll investigate the
performance (throughput and round-trip time) of the TCP connection between
your computer and the server.
Before beginning this lab, you’ll probably want to review sections 3.5 and 3.7 in
the text1.

1. Capturing a bulk TCP transfer from your computer to a remote

server

Before beginning our exploration of TCP, we’ll need to use Wireshark to obtain a
packet trace of the TCP transfer of a file from your computer to a remote server.
You’ll do so by accessing a Web page that will allow you to enter the name of a
file stored on your computer (which contains the ASCII text of Alice in
Wonderland), and then transfer the file to a Web server using the HTTP POST
method (see section 2.2.3 in the text). We’re using the POST method rather than
the GET method as we’d like to transfer a large amount of data from your
computer to another computer. Of course, we’ll be running Wireshark during this
time to obtain the trace of the TCP segments sent and received from your
computer.

Do the following:

• Start up your web browser. Go the

http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/wiresharklabs/alice.txt and retrieve an ASCII copy
of Alice in Wonderland. Store this file somewhere on your computer.
• Next go to http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/wireshark-labs/TCP-wireshark-
file1.html.
• You should see a screen that looks like:

1 References to figures and sections are for the 8th edition of our text, Computer Networks, A Top-down
Approach, 8th ed., J.F. Kurose and K.W. Ross, Addison-Wesley/Pearson, 2020.
• Use the Browse button in this form to enter the name of the file (full path
name) on your computer containing Alice in Wonderland (or do so
manually). Don’t yet press the “Upload alice.txt file” button.
• Now start up Wireshark and begin packet capture (Capture->Start) and
then press OK on the Wireshark Packet Capture Options screen (we’ll not
need to select any options here).
• Returning to your browser, press the “Upload alice.txt file” button to
upload the file to the gaia.cs.umass.edu server. Once the file has been
uploaded, a short congratulations message will be displayed in your
browser window.
• Stop Wireshark packet capture. Your Wireshark window should look
similar to the window shown below.
If you are unable to run Wireshark on a live network connection, you can
download a packet trace file that was captured while following the steps above on
one of the author’s computers2. You may well find it valuable to download this
trace even if you’ve captured your own trace and use it, as well as your own trace,
when you explore the questions below.

2. A first look at the captured trace

Before analyzing the behavior of the TCP connection in detail, let’s take a high
level view of the trace.
• First, filter the packets displayed in the Wireshark window by entering “tcp”
(lowercase, no quotes, and don’t forget to press return after entering!) into
the display filter specification window towards the top of the Wireshark
window.

2 Download the zip file http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/wireshark-labs/wireshark-traces.zip and extract

the file tcpethereal-trace-1. The traces in this zip file were collected by Wireshark running on one
of the author’s computers, while performing the steps indicated in the Wireshark lab. Once you
have downloaded the trace, you can load it into Wireshark and view the trace using the File pull
down menu, choosing Open, and then selecting the tcp-ethereal-trace-1 trace file.
What you should see is series of TCP and HTTP messages between your computer
and gaia.cs.umass.edu. You should see the initial three-way handshake containing
a SYN message. You should see an HTTP POST message. Depending on the
version of

Wireshark you are using, you might see a series of “HTTP Continuation”
messages being sent from your computer to gaia.cs.umass.edu. Recall from our
discussion in the earlier HTTP Wireshark lab, that is no such thing as an HTTP
Continuation message – this is Wireshark’s way of indicating that there are
multiple TCP segments being used to carry a single HTTP message. In more
recent versions of Wireshark, you’ll see “[TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]”
in the Info column of the Wireshark display to indicate that this TCP segment
contained data that belonged to an upper layer protocol message (in our case here,
HTTP). You should also see TCP ACK segments being returned from
gaia.cs.umass.edu to your computer.

Answer the following questions, by opening the Wireshark captured packet file
tcpethereal-trace-1 in http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/wireshark-labs/wireshark-traces.zip
(that is download the trace and open that trace in Wireshark; see footnote 2).
Whenever possible, when answering a question you should hand in a printout of
the packet(s) within the trace that you used to answer the question asked.
Annotate the printout3 to explain your answer. To print a packet, use File->Print,
choose Selected packet only, choose Packet summary line, and select the minimum
amount of packet detail that you need to answer the question.
1. What is the IP address and TCP port number used by the client computer
(source) that is transferring the file to gaia.cs.umass.edu? To answer this
question, it’s probably easiest to select an HTTP message and explore the
details of the TCP packet used to carry this HTTP message, using the
“details of the selected packet header window” (refer to Figure 2 in the
“Getting Started with Wireshark” Lab if you’re uncertain about the
Wireshark windows.
2. What is the IP address of gaia.cs.umass.edu? On what port number is it
sending and receiving TCP segments for this connection?

If you have been able to create your own trace, answer the following question:

3. What is the IP address and TCP port number used by your client computer
(source) to transfer the file to gaia.cs.umass.edu?

Since this lab is about TCP rather than HTTP, let’s change Wireshark’s “listing of
captured packets” window so that it shows information about the TCP segments

3 What do we mean by “annotate”? If you hand in a paper copy, please highlight where in the
printout you’ve found the answer and add some text (preferably with a colored pen) noting what you
found in what you ‘ve highlight. If you hand in an electronic copy, it would be great if you could
also highlight and annotate.
containing the HTTP messages, rather than about the HTTP messages. To have
Wireshark do this, select Analyze->Enabled Protocols. Then uncheck the HTTP
box and select OK. You should now see a Wireshark window that looks like:

This is what we’re looking for - a series of TCP segments sent between your
computer and gaia.cs.umass.edu. We will use the packet trace that you have
captured (and/or the packet trace tcp-ethereal-trace-1 in
http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/wireshark-labs/wiresharktraces.zip; see earlier footnote) to
study TCP behavior in the rest of this lab.

3. TCP Basics

Answer the following questions for the TCP segments:

4. What is the sequence number of the TCP SYN segment that is used to
initiate the TCP connection between the client computer and
 gaia.cs.umass.edu? What is it in the segment that identifies the segment as
a SYN segment?
Sort according to time and see the first tcp request sequence 0. In flag
check if Syn:set
5. What is the sequence number of the SYNACK segment sent by
gaia.cs.umass.edu to the client computer in reply to the SYN? What is the
value of the Acknowledgement field in the SYNACK segment? How did
gaia.cs.umass.edu determine that value? What is it in the segment that
identifies the segment as a SYNACK segment?
Sequence 0, Ack =1, Ack value for syn + ack is equal to the sequence number of
next ack segment
Syn and ack both flag are set
6. What is the sequence number of the TCP segment containing the HTTP
POST command? Note that in order to find the POST command, you’ll
need to dig into the packet content field at the bottom of the Wireshark
window, looking for a segment with a “POST” within its DATA field.
Refer to psh,ack
7. Consider the TCP segment containing the HTTP POST as the first segment
in the TCP connection. What are the sequence numbers of the first six
segments in the TCP connection (including the segment containing the
HTTP POST)? At what time was each segment sent? When was the ACK
for each segment received? Given the difference between when each TCP
segment was sent, and when its acknowledgement was received, what is
the RTT value for each of the six segments? What is the EstimatedRTT
value (see Section 3.5.3, page 242 in text) after the receipt of each ACK?
Assume that the value of the
EstimatedRTT is equal to the measured RTT for the first segment, and
then is computed using the EstimatedRTT equation on page 242 for all
subsequent segments.
Note: Wireshark has a nice feature that allows you to plot the RTT
for each of the TCP segments sent. Select a TCP segment in the
“listing of captured packets” window that is being sent from the
client to the gaia.cs.umass.edu server. Then select: Statistics->TCP
Stream Graph>Round Trip Time Graph.
8. What is the length of each of the first six TCP segments?4

4 The TCP segments in the tcp-ethereal-trace-1 trace file are all less that 1460 bytes. This is
because the computer on which the trace was gathered has an Ethernet card that limits the length of
the maximum IP packet to 1500 bytes (40 bytes of TCP/IP header data and 1460 bytes of TCP
payload). This 1500 byte value is the standard maximum length allowed by Ethernet. If your trace
indicates a TCP length greater than 1500 bytes, and your computer is using an Ethernet connection,
then Wireshark is reporting the wrong TCP segment length; it will likely also show only one large
TCP segment rather than multiple smaller segments. Your computer is indeed probably sending
multiple smaller segments, as indicated by the ACKs it receives. This inconsistency in reported
segment lengths is due to the interaction between the Ethernet driver and the Wireshark software.
We recommend that if you have this inconsistency, that you perform this lab using the provided
trace file.
 9. What is the minimum amount of available buffer space advertised at the
received for the entire trace? Does the lack of receiver buffer space ever
throttle the sender?
Window size
10. Are there any retransmitted segments in the trace file? What did you check
for (in the trace) in order to answer this question?
No, because seq no is increasing so no retransmitted
11. How much data does the receiver typically acknowledge in an ACK? Can
you identify cases where the receiver is ACKing every other received
segment (see Table 3.2 on page 250 in the text).

12. What is the throughput (bytes transferred per unit time) for the TCP
connection? Explain how you calculated this value.

4. TCP congestion control in action

Let’s now examine the amount of data sent per unit time from the client to the
server. Rather than (tediously!) calculating this from the raw data in the Wireshark
window, we’ll use one of Wireshark’s TCP graphing utilities - Time-Sequence-
Graph(Stevens) - to plot out data.
• Select a TCP segment in the Wireshark’s “listing of captured-packets”
window. Then select the menu : Statistics->TCP Stream Graph-> Time-
SequenceGraph(Stevens). You should see a plot that looks similar to the
following plot, which was created from the captured packets in the packet
trace tcp-etherealtrace-1 in
http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/wireshark-labs/wireshark-traces.zip (see earlier
footnote ):
 Here, each dot represents a TCP segment sent, plotting the sequence
number of the segment versus the time at which it was sent. Note that a set
of dots stacked above each other represents a series of packets that were
sent back-to-back by the sender.

Answer the following questions for the TCP segments the packet trace tcp-
etherealtrace-1 in http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/wireshark-labs/wireshark-traces.zip
13. Use the Time-Sequence-Graph(Stevens) plotting tool to view the sequence
number versus time plot of segments being sent from the client to the
gaia.cs.umass.edu server. Can you identify where TCP’s slowstart phase
begins and ends, and where congestion avoidance takes over? Comment
on ways in which the measured data differs from the idealized behavior of
TCP that we’ve studied in the text.
Answer each of two questions above for the trace that you have gathered when you transferred a
file from your computer to gaia.cs.umass.edu