CS 455 Spring 2013 | CS455-S13 / Mid-Term Study Guide

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Notes:

Regarding terms, you should know the definitions and concepts well enough to be able to answer "compare and contrast", "define the term", "fill-in-the-blank", and "definition matching" questions.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of possible questions for the exam. It is meant to give you a general idea of the possible types of questions that might be asked and an idea of the topics I think are most important.
You should also study homework questions and problems that we've discussed during lectures.

Tentative Exam Format: (subject to change)

Terms:

Questions:

What's the difference between an end system and a router?
Why is fiber optic cable often used in the Internet backbone?
What are 2 types of multiplexing in circuit switching?
Out of dial-up modems, cable modems, and DSL modems, which provide dedicated access?
What causes packet loss?
What are the 4 types of delay that a packet can encounter when traveling through a network? For a fixed path and fixed packet size, which are constant and which are variable?
What are the main factors that affect queuing delay? (Not for a specific packet, but overall)
What does it mean for a network to be store-and-forward?
Explain how traceroute works.
What are the 5 TCP/IP protocol layers?
Given a set of links with different link speeds, indicate which is the bottleneck link.
Compute the number of users that could be supported in a circuit switching system, given the link speed and bandwidth requirements of each host.
Compute transmission delay given link speed and packet size.
Compute the propagation delay given propagation speed and physical distance.
Compute when bits of a packet arrive at the destination (or end-to-end delay) given link speed, propagation delay, and packet size.
Compute the bandwidth-delay product of a link given link speed and propagation delay.

Terms:

Questions:

What is the main difference between the operation of a client-server application and a peer-to-peer application?
Why might an application want to use UDP instead of TCP?
What two elements are needed to address a communicating process?
What is the TCP 3-way handshake?
Do either of the Internet Transport Protocols (TCP, UDP) provide guaranteed delays or guaranteed bandwidth?
What is a socket? What is it used for?
Why do TCP server typically use two sockets instead of just one?

Terms:

Questions:

What is the default port used for HTTP servers?
What is the typical application-level exchange for a HTTP/1.0 transfer?
Which are typically larger - HTTP requests or HTTP responses?
What is the HTTP status code for a successful response?
What is the HTTP status code for a page that is not found?
How can a HTTP/1.0 transfer be made to use persistent connections?
What are some factors that determine the hit ratio of a proxy cache?
Given a network topology, compute the total delay for a HTTP/1.0 request-response pair. Include all TCP-related operations. Assume that the IP address is known.
List all TCP connections that would be needed to request a web page using persistent connections with pipelining where the base page is at host1 and there are 3 embedded objects located at host1, host2, and host3, respectively.
Compute the total delay to download all elements of a web page, given a network topology and number and size of embedded objects in the web page using non-persistent connections, persistent connections, N parallel connections, and persistent connections with pipelining.
Compute the traffic intensity on a link given the request rate, average object size, and link speed.
Compute the traffic intensity of a network once a web cache with a X% hit rate has been installed.
Compute the average response time for downloading an HTTP object using a cache - given the information in the previous two questions.

Terms:

Question:

Decrypt a message using a simple Caesar cipher.
Explain how a Alice can digitally sign a message for Bob using public-key cryptography. The goal is for Bob to be sure that only Alice could have sent the message.
Why are trusted third parties, like certification authorities, necessary for public key cryptography?
How can you tell if a website is using the secure HTTP protocol, HTTPS?
An HTTP server sends a client a message M, a signed version of M, and a certificate. Explain how the client validates the server.
- After the client validates the server, how does it encrypt messages to the server?

Terms:

Questions:

Terms:

Questions:

How can DNS be used for load distribution?
Why does it make sense for DNS to use UDP instead of TCP?
Does a typical DNS lookup a recursive query, iterative query, or some combination of both? Explain.
If a given hostname needs to be resolved, but the default name server has an empty cache, how many DNS requests will the default name server typically have to make before the address is resolved?
If a given hostname needs to be resolved, but the default name server has an empty cache, what DNS servers will be contacted by the local authoritative server and how will they respond?
Why can't the root DNS servers store all of the hostname to IP address translations?
Given an example DNS name resolution that starts with an empty cache, show the contents of the cache after the name resolution has completed.
Is DNS a transport-level protocol or application-level?
When does DNS name resolution occur (i.e., before a TCP connection starts or after)?
Include the DNS name resolution processing time in other questions, such as determining response time of an HTTP request.
How does your local mail server use DNS to obtain the IP address of a remote mail server?
Explain why if DNS goes down, the Internet essentially goes down.

CS455-S13: Mid-Term Study Guide