COMPUTER NETWORKS
FOURTH EDITION
PROBLEM SOLUTIONS
ANDREW S. TANENBAUM
Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
PRENTICE HALL PTR
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PROBLEM SOLUTIONS1 SOLUTIONS TO CHAPTER1PROBLEMS
1.The dog can carry21gigabytes,or168gigabits.A speed of18km/hour
equals0.005km/sec.The time to travel distance x km is x/0.005=200x sec, yielding a data rate of168/200x Gbps or840/x Mbps.For x<5.6km,the dog has a higher rate than the communication line.
2.The LAN model can be grown incrementally.If the LAN is just a long cable.
it cannot be brought down by a single failure(if the servers are replicated)It is probably cheaper.It provides more computing power and better interactive interfaces.
3.A transcontinentalfiber link might have many gigabits/sec of bandwidth,but
the latency will also be high due to the speed of light propagation over thousands of kilometers.In contrast,a56-kbps modem calling a computer in the same building has low bandwidth and low latency.
4.A uniform delivery time is needed for voice,so the amount of jitter in the net-
work is important.This could be expressed as the standard deviation of the delivery time.Having short delay but large variability is actually worse than
a somewhat longer delay and low variability.
5.No.The speed of propagation is200,000km/sec or200meters/µsec.In10µsec the signal travels2km.Thus,each switch adds the equivalent of2km of extra cable.If the client and server are separated by5000km,traversing even50switches adds only100km to the total path,which is only2%.Thus, switching delay is not a major factor under these circumstances.
6.The request has to go up and down,and the response has to go up and down.
The total path length traversed is thus160,000km.The speed of light in air and vacuum is300,000km/sec,so the propagation delay alone is 160,000/300,000sec or about533msec.
7.There is obviously no single correct answer here,but the following points
seem relevant.The present system has a great deal of inertia(checks and bal-ances)built into it.This inertia may serve to keep the legal,economic,and social systems from being turned upside down every time a different party comes to power.Also,many people hold strong opinions on controversial social issues,without really knowing the facts of the matter.Allowing poorly reasoned opinions be to written into law may be undesirable.The potential effects of advertising campaigns by special interest groups of one kind or another also have to be considered.Another major issue is security.A lot of people might worry about some14-year kid hacking the system and falsifying the results.
