Mid Sem Study Guide

This page contains the things you need to learn for the Mid Sem Test

In order to do well in the mid-semester test, you need to be able to:

Identify network components as hosts, interfaces, links, nodes, switches and routers and be able to apply the definitions.
Recognise and interpret different network topologies, including star, line, ring, bus, mesh and mixed topologies, and be able to identify which hosts will have connectivity should a given link or interface fail.
Confirm or reject statements on these topologies as true or false.
Confirm or reject statements on protocols as true or false.
Determine whether a simple protocol is complete and unambiguous and identify what the protocol needs to achieve completeness and correctness.
Confirm or reject statements on physical layer protocols as true or false.
Give alternative interpretations of signals based on timing prescriptions in a protocol.
Confirm or reject statements on physical layers with repeaters as true or false.
Confirm or reject statements on the behaviour of hubs and switches as true or false.
Identify which frames are seen or forwarded on which ports on a switch or hub under which circumstances.
Populate a switching table given a list of frames sent to the switch.
Identify potential problems in the connection of multiple switches.
Confirm or reject statements on framing in different data link layers for different physical layers as true or false.
Confirm or reject statements on data link layer addressing as true or false.
Recognise MAC addresses in different formats.
Confirm or reject statements on MAC addresses as true or false.
Recognise which transmissions on a shared medium will collide given transmission times, durations, and propagation times.
Confirm or reject statements on CSMA/CD as true or false.
Confirm or reject statements on data link layer tasks such as media access control, error detection and correction, local flow control etc. as true or false.
Determine the RTT of frame and packets given transmission and propagation time information.
Confirm or reject statements on the use of RTT in error recovery as true or false.
Apply the concepts of transmission time, propagation time and effective data rate to given communication scenarios.
Confirm or reject statements on the use of ACKs in error recovery as true or false.
Confirm or reject statements on IP addresses as true or false.
Distinguish between netmasks and IP addresses.
Convert IP addresses and netmasks from binary to dotted decimal format and vice versa.
Identify netid and hostid given an IPv4 address and a netmask or a CIDR suffix.
Identify the network address of a given IPv4 address with a netmask or CIDR suffix.
Identify the local broadcast address of a network from a given IPv4 address with a netmask or CIDR suffix.
Identify the theoretical size (capacity) of the network from a given IPv4 address with a netmask or CIDR suffix.
Use a netmask and a network address to determine whether a given IP address is part of a network or not.
Identify which MAC and IP addresses are used at different stages of an IP packet journey.
Identify which MAC and IP addresses are used in which packets of DHCP transactions and of ARP requests and responses.
Identify the order in which, and the MAC and IP addresses to which messages in DHCP are sent.
Perform subnetting tasks similar to those in your assignment.
Identify which route in a routing table will be used to forward an IP packet with a given destination IP address.
Determine the TCP sequence numbers of packets given information on packet sizes and, where applicable, ACK numbers from the opposite side, in situations with and without packet loss.
Determine the sequence and ACK numbers during the TCP connection handshake given an initial sequence number.
Determine the ACK numbers in TCP connections before and after packet loss, as well as after retransmission.
Determine the relative position and movement of pointers in TCP transmit and receive buffers following the writing, sending, receipt, acknowledgment and/or reading of data.
Determine the minimum number of available buffer bytes at a receiver given ACK number, advertised window, and recent packet transmission history of the sender.
Identify true and false statements on the sequence of events in recursive, iterative, and mixed DNS lookup scenarios.
Identify the ports of commonly used protocols.
Confirm or reject statements on the use of firewalls as true or false.
Given simple firewall rules and packets, determine which packets will be forwarded and which ones will not.