Ethernet

4.3 Ethernet

We have now finished our general discussion of channel allocation protocols in the abstract, so it is time to see how these principles apply to real systems, in particular, LANs. As discussed in Sec. 1.5.3, the IEEE has standardized a number of local area networks and metropolitan area networks under the name of IEEE 802. A few have survived but many have not, as we saw in Fig. 1-38. Some people who believe in reincarnation think that Charles Darwin came back as a member of the IEEE Standards Association to weed out the unfit. The most important of the survivors are 802.3 (Ethernet) and 802.11 (wireless LAN). With 802.15 (Bluetooth) and 802.16 (wireless MAN), it is too early to tell. Please consult the 5th edition of this book to find out. Both 802.3 and 802.11 have different physical layers and different MAC sublayers but converge on the same logical link control sublayer (defined in 802.2), so they have the same interface to the network layer.

We introduced Ethernet in Sec. 1.5.3 and will not repeat that material here. Instead we will focus on the technical details of Ethernet, the protocols, and recent developments in high-speed (gigabit) Ethernet. Since Ethernet and IEEE 802.3 are identical except for two minor differences that we will discuss shortly, many people use the terms ''Ethernet'' and ''IEEE 802.3'' interchangeably, and we will do so, too. For more information about Ethernet, see (Breyer and Riley, 1999 ; Seifert, 1998; and Spurgeon, 2000).

4.3.1 Ethernet Cabling

Since the name ''Ethernet'' refers to the cable (the ether), let us start our discussion there. Four types of cabling are commonly used, as shown in Fig. 4-13.

Figure 4-13. The most common kinds of Ethernet cabling.

Historically, 10Base5 cabling, popularly called thick Ethernet, came first. It resembles a yellow garden hose, with markings every 2.5 meters to show where the taps go. (The 802.3 standard does not actually require the cable to be yellow, but it does suggest it.) Connections to it are generally made using vampire taps, in which a pin is very carefully forced halfway into the coaxial cable's core. The notation 10Base5 means that it operates at 10 Mbps, uses baseband signaling, and can support segments of up to 500 meters. The first number is the speed in Mbps. Then comes the word ''Base'' (or sometimes ''BASE'') to indicate baseband transmission. There used to be a broadband variant, 10Broad36, but it never caught on in the marketplace and has since vanished. Finally, if the medium is coax, its length is given rounded to units of 100 m after ''Base.''

Historically, the second cable type was 10Base2, or thin Ethernet, which, in contrast to the garden-hose-like thick Ethernet, bends easily. Connections to it are made using industry-standard BNC connectors to form T junctions, rather than using vampire taps. BNC connectors are easier to use and more reliable. Thin Ethernet is much cheaper and easier to install, but it can run for only 185 meters per segment, each of which can handle only 30 machines.

Detecting cable breaks, excessive length, bad taps, or loose connectors can be a major problem with both media. For this reason, techniques have been developed to track them down. Basically, a pulse of known shape is injected into the cable. If the pulse hits an obstacle or the end of the cable, an echo will be generated and sent back. By carefully timing the interval between sending the pulse and receiving the echo, it is possible to localize the origin of the echo. This technique is called time domain reflectometry.

The problems associated with finding cable breaks drove systems toward a different kind of wiring pattern, in which all stations have a cable running to a central hub in which they are all connected electrically (as if they were soldered together). Usually, these wires are telephone company twisted pairs, since most office buildings are already wired this way, and normally plenty of spare pairs are available. This scheme is called 10Base-T. Hubs do not buffer incoming traffic. We will discuss an improved version of this idea (switches), which do buffer incoming traffic later in this chapter.

These three wiring schemes are illustrated in Fig. 4-14. For 10Base5, a transceiver is clamped securely around the cable so that its tap makes contact with the inner core. The transceiver contains the electronics that handle carrier detection and collision detection. When a collision is detected, the transceiver also puts a special invalid signal on the cable to ensure that all other transceivers also realize that a collision has occurred.

Figure 4-14. Three kinds of Ethernet cabling. (a) 10Base5. (b) 10Base2. (c) 10Base-T.

With 10Base5, a transceiver cable or drop cable connects the transceiver to an interface board in the computer. The transceiver cable may be up to 50 meters long and contains five individually shielded twisted pairs. Two of the pairs are for data in and data out, respectively. Two more are for control signals in and out. The fifth pair, which is not always used, allows the computer to power the transceiver electronics. Some transceivers allow up to eight nearby computers to be attached to them, to reduce the number of transceivers needed.

The transceiver cable terminates on an interface board inside the computer. The interface board contains a controller chip that transmits frames to, and receives frames from, the transceiver. The controller is responsible for assembling the data into the proper frame format, as well as computing checksums on outgoing frames and verifying them on incoming frames. Some controller chips also manage a pool of buffers for incoming frames, a queue of buffers to be transmitted, direct memory transfers with the host computers, and other aspects of network management.

With 10Base2, the connection to the cable is just a passive BNC T-junction connector. The transceiver electronics are on the controller board, and each station always has its own transceiver.

With 10Base-T, there is no shared cable at all, just the hub (a box full of electronics) to which each station is connected by a dedicated (i.e., not shared) cable. Adding or removing a station is simpler in this configuration, and cable breaks can be detected easily. The disadvantage of 10Base-T is that the maximum cable run from the hub is only 100 meters, maybe 200 meters if very high quality category 5 twisted pairs are used. Nevertheless, 10Base-T quickly became dominant due to its use of existing wiring and the ease of maintenance that it offers. A faster version of 10Base-T (100Base-T) will be discussed later in this chapter.

A fourth cabling option for Ethernet is 10Base-F, which uses fiber optics. This alternative is expensive due to the cost of the connectors and terminators, but it has excellent noise immunity and is the method of choice when running between buildings or widely-separated hubs. Runs of up to km are allowed. It also offers good security since wiretapping fiber is much more difficult than wiretapping copper wire.

Figure 4-15 shows different ways of wiring a building. In Fig. 4-15(a), a single cable is snaked from room to room, with each station tapping into it at the nearest point. In Fig. 4-15(b), a vertical spine runs from the basement to the roof, with horizontal cables on each floor connected to the spine by special amplifiers (repeaters). In some buildings, the horizontal cables are thin and the backbone is thick. The most general topology is the tree, as in Fig. 4-15(c), because a network with two paths between some pairs of stations would suffer from interference between the two signals.

Figure 4-15. Cable topologies. (a) Linear. (b) Spine. (c) Tree. (d) Segmented.

Each version of Ethernet has a maximum cable length per segment. To allow larger networks, multiple cables can be connected by repeaters, as shown in Fig. 4-15(d). A repeater is a physical layer device. It receives, amplifies (regenerates), and retransmits signals in both directions. As far as the software is concerned, a series of cable segments connected by repeaters is no different from a single cable (except for some delay introduced by the repeaters). A system may contain multiple cable segments and multiple repeaters, but no two transceivers may be more than 2.5 km apart and no path between any two transceivers may traverse more than four repeaters.

4.3.2 Manchester Encoding

None of the versions of Ethernet uses straight binary encoding with 0 volts for a 0 bit and 5 volts for a 1 bit because it leads to ambiguities. If one station sends the bit string 0001000, others might falsely interpret it as 10000000 or 01000000 because they cannot tell the difference between an idle sender (0 volts) and a 0 bit (0 volts). This problem can be solved by using +1 volts for a 1 and -1 volts for a 0, but there is still the problem of a receiver sampling the signal at a slightly different frequency than the sender used to generate it. Different clock speeds can cause the receiver and sender to get out of synchronization about where the bit boundaries are, especially after a long run of consecutive 0s or a long run of consecutive 1s.

What is needed is a way for receivers to unambiguously determine the start, end, or middle of each bit without reference to an external clock. Two such approaches are called Manchester encoding and differential Manchester encoding. With Manchester encoding, each bit period is divided into two equal intervals. A binary 1 bit is sent by having the voltage set high during the first interval and low in the second one. A binary 0 is just the reverse: first low and then high. This scheme ensures that every bit period has a transition in the middle, making it easy for the receiver to synchronize with the sender. A disadvantage of Manchester encoding is that it requires twice as much bandwidth as straight binary encoding because the pulses are half the width. For example, to send data at 10 Mbps, the signal has to change 20 million times/sec. Manchester encoding is shown in Fig. 4-16(b).

Figure 4-16. (a) Binary encoding. (b) Manchester encoding. (c) Differential Manchester encoding.

Differential Manchester encoding, shown in Fig. 4-16(c), is a variation of basic Manchester encoding. In it, a 1 bit is indicated by the absence of a transition at the start of the interval. A 0 bit is indicated by the presence of a transition at the start of the interval. In both cases, there is a transition in the middle as well. The differential scheme requires more complex equipment but offers better noise immunity. All Ethernet systems use Manchester encoding due to its simplicity. The high signal is + 0.85 volts and the low signal is - 0.85 volts, giving a DC value of 0 volts. Ethernet does not use differential Manchester encoding, but other LANs (e.g., the 802.5 token ring) do use it.

4.3.3 The Ethernet MAC Sublayer Protocol

The original DIX (DEC, Intel, Xerox) frame structure is shown in Fig. 4-17(a). Each frame starts with a Preamble of 8 bytes, each containing the bit pattern 10101010. The Manchester encoding of this pattern produces a 10-MHz square wave for 6.4 µsec to allow the receiver's clock to synchronize with the sender's. They are required to stay synchronized for the rest of the frame, using the Manchester encoding to keep track of the bit boundaries.

Figure 4-17. Frame formats. (a) DIX Ethernet. (b) IEEE 802.3.

The frame contains two addresses, one for the destination and one for the source. The standard allows 2-byte and 6-byte addresses, but the parameters defined for the 10-Mbps baseband standard use only the 6-byte addresses. The high-order bit of the destination address is a 0 for ordinary addresses and 1 for group addresses. Group addresses allow multiple stations to listen to a single address. When a frame is sent to a group address, all the stations in the group receive it. Sending to a group of stations is called multicast. The address consisting of all 1 bits is reserved for broadcast. A frame containing all 1s in the destination field is accepted by all stations on the network. The difference between multicast and broadcast is important enough to warrant repeating. A multicast frame is sent to a selected group of stations on the Ethernet; a broadcast frame is sent to all stations on the Ethernet. Multicast is more selective, but involves group management. Broadcasting is coarser but does not require any group management.

Another interesting feature of the addressing is the use of bit 46 (adjacent to the high-order bit) to distinguish local from global addresses. Local addresses are assigned by each network administrator and have no significance outside the local network. Global addresses, in contrast, are assigned centrally by IEEE to ensure that no two stations anywhere in the world have the same global address. With 48 - 2 = 46 bits available, there are about 7 x 10¹³ global addresses. The idea is that any station can uniquely address any other station by just giving the right 48-bit number. It is up to the network layer to figure out how to locate the destination.

Next comes the Type field, which tells the receiver what to do with the frame. Multiple network-layer protocols may be in use at the same time on the same machine, so when an Ethernet frame arrives, the kernel has to know which one to hand the frame to. The Type field specifies which process to give the frame to.

Next come the data, up to 1500 bytes. This limit was chosen somewhat arbitrarily at the time the DIX standard was cast in stone, mostly based on the fact that a transceiver needs enough RAM to hold an entire frame and RAM was expensive in 1978. A larger upper limit would have meant more RAM, hence a more expensive transceiver.

In addition to there being a maximum frame length, there is also a minimum frame length. While a data field of 0 bytes is sometimes useful, it causes a problem. When a transceiver detects a collision, it truncates the current frame, which means that stray bits and pieces of frames appear on the cable all the time. To make it easier to distinguish valid frames from garbage, Ethernet requires that valid frames must be at least 64 bytes long, from destination address to checksum, including both. If the data portion of a frame is less than 46 bytes, the Pad field is used to fill out the frame to the minimum size.

Another (and more important) reason for having a minimum length frame is to prevent a station from completing the transmission of a short frame before the first bit has even reached the far end of the cable, where it may collide with another frame. This problem is illustrated in Fig. 4-18. At time 0, station A, at one end of the network, sends off a frame. Let us call the propagation time for this frame to reach the other end t. Just before the frame gets to the other end (i.e., at time t-e), the most distant station, B, starts transmitting. When B detects that it is receiving more power than it is putting out, it knows that a collision has occurred, so it aborts its transmission and generates a 48-bit noise burst to warn all other stations. In other words, it jams the ether to make sure the sender does not miss the collision. At about time 2t, the sender sees the noise burst and aborts its transmission, too. It then waits a random time before trying again.

Figure 4-18. Collision detection can take as long as 2t.

If a station tries to transmit a very short frame, it is conceivable that a collision occurs, but the transmission completes before the noise burst gets back at 2t. The sender will then incorrectly conclude that the frame was successfully sent. To prevent this situation from occurring, all frames must take more than 2t to send so that the transmission is still taking place when the noise burst gets back to the sender. For a 10-Mbps LAN with a maximum length of 2500 meters and four repeaters (from the 802.3 specification), the round-trip time (including time to propagate through the four repeaters) has been determined to be nearly 50 µsec in the worst case, including the time to pass through the repeaters, which is most certainly not zero. Therefore, the minimum frame must take at least this long to transmit. At 10 Mbps, a bit takes 100 nsec, so 500 bits is the smallest frame that is guaranteed to work. To add some margin of safety, this number was rounded up to 512 bits or 64 bytes. Frames with fewer than 64 bytes are padded out to 64 bytes with the Pad field.

As the network speed goes up, the minimum frame length must go up or the maximum cable length must come down, proportionally. For a 2500-meter LAN operating at 1 Gbps, the minimum frame size would have to be 6400 bytes. Alternatively, the minimum frame size could be 640 bytes and the maximum distance between any two stations 250 meters. These restrictions are becoming increasingly painful as we move toward multigigabit networks.

The final Ethernet field is the Checksum. It is effectively a 32-bit hash code of the data. If some data bits are erroneously received (due to noise on the cable), the checksum will almost certainly be wrong and the error will be detected. It just does error detection, not forward error correction.

When IEEE standardized Ethernet, the committee made two changes to the DIX format, as shown in Fig. 4-17(b). The first one was to reduce the preamble to 7 bytes and use the last byte for a Start of Frame delimiter, for compatibility with 802.4 and 802.5. The second one was to change the Type field into a Length field. Of course, now there was no way for the receiver to figure out what to do with an incoming frame, but that problem was handled by the addition of a small header to the data portion itself to provide this information. We will discuss the format of the data portion when we come to logical link control later in this chapter.

Unfortunately, by the time 802.3 was published, so much hardware and software for DIX Ethernet was already in use that few manufacturers and users were enthusiastic about converting the Type field into a Length field. In 1997 IEEE threw in the towel and said that both ways were fine with it. Fortunately, all the Type fields in use before 1997 were greater than 1500. Consequently, any number there less than or equal to 1500 can be interpreted as Length, and any number greater than 1500 can be interpreted as Type. Now IEEE can maintain that everyone is using its standard and everybody else can keep on doing what they were already doing without feeling guilty about it.

4.3.4 The Binary Exponential Backoff Algorithm

Let us now see how randomization is done when a collision occurs. The model is that of Fig. 4-5. After a collision, time is divided into discrete slots whose length is equal to the worst-case round-trip propagation time on the ether (2t). To accommodate the longest path allowed by Ethernet, the slot time has been set to 512 bit times, or 51.2 µsec as mentioned above.

After the first collision, each station waits either 0 or 1 slot times before trying again. If two stations collide and each one picks the same random number, they will collide again. After the second collision, each one picks either 0, 1, 2, or 3 at random and waits that number of slot times. If a third collision occurs (the probability of this happening is 0.25), then the next time the number of slots to wait is chosen at random from the interval 0 to 2³ - 1.

In general, after i collisions, a random number between 0 and 2ⁱ - 1 is chosen, and that number of slots is skipped. However, after ten collisions have been reached, the randomization interval is frozen at a maximum of 1023 slots. After 16 collisions, the controller throws in the towel and reports failure back to the computer. Further recovery is up to higher layers.

This algorithm, called binary exponential backoff, was chosen to dynamically adapt to the number of stations trying to send. If the randomization interval for all collisions was 1023, the chance of two stations colliding for a second time would be negligible, but the average wait after a collision would be hundreds of slot times, introducing significant delay. On the other hand, if each station always delayed for either zero or one slots, then if 100 stations ever tried to send at once, they would collide over and over until 99 of them picked 1 and the remaining station picked 0. This might take years. By having the randomization interval grow exponentially as more and more consecutive collisions occur, the algorithm ensures a low delay when only a few stations collide but also ensures that the collision is resolved in a reasonable interval when many stations collide. Truncating the backoff at 1023 keeps the bound from growing too large.

As described so far, CSMA/CD provides no acknowledgements. Since the mere absence of collisions does not guarantee that bits were not garbled by noise spikes on the cable, for reliable communication the destination must verify the checksum, and if correct, send back an acknowledgement frame to the source. Normally, this acknowledgement would be just another frame as far as the protocol is concerned and would have to fight for channel time just like a data frame. However, a simple modification to the contention algorithm would allow speedy confirmation of frame receipt (Tokoro and Tamaru, 1977). All that would be needed is to reserve the first contention slot following successful transmission for the destination station. Unfortunately, the standard does not provide for this possibility.

4.3.5 Ethernet Performance

Now let us briefly examine the performance of Ethernet under conditions of heavy and constant load, that is, k stations always ready to transmit. A rigorous analysis of the binary exponential backoff algorithm is complicated. Instead, we will follow Metcalfe and Boggs (1976) and assume a constant retransmission probability in each slot. If each station transmits during a contention slot with probability p, the probability A that some station acquires the channel in that slot is

Equation 4

A is maximized when p = 1/k, with A 1/e as k . The probability that the contention interval has exactly j slots in it is A(1 - A)^{j - 1}, so the mean number of slots per contention is given by

Since each slot has a duration 2t, the mean contention interval, w, is 2t/A. Assuming optimal p, the mean number of contention slots is never more than e, so w is at most 2te 5.4t.

If the mean frame takes P sec to transmit, when many stations have frames to send,

Equation 4

Here we see where the maximum cable distance between any two stations enters into the performance figures, giving rise to topologies other than that of Fig. 4-15(a). The longer the cable, the longer the contention interval. This observation is why the Ethernet standard specifies a maximum cable length.

It is instructive to formulate Eq. (4-6) in terms of the frame length, F, the network bandwidth, B, the cable length, L, and the speed of signal propagation, c, for the optimal case of e contention slots per frame. With P = F/B, Eq. (4-6) becomes

Equation 4

When the second term in the denominator is large, network efficiency will be low. More specifically, increasing network bandwidth or distance (the BL product) reduces efficiency for a given frame size. Unfortunately, much research on network hardware is aimed precisely at increasing this product. People want high bandwidth over long distances (fiber optic MANs, for example), which suggests that Ethernet implemented in this manner may not be the best system for these applications. We will see other ways of implementing Ethernet when we come to switched Ethernet later in this chapter.

In Fig. 4-19, the channel efficiency is plotted versus number of ready stations for 2t=51.2 µsec and a data rate of 10 Mbps, using Eq. (4-7). With a 64-byte slot time, it is not surprising that 64-byte frames are not efficient. On the other hand, with 1024-byte frames and an asymptotic value of e 64-byte slots per contention interval, the contention period is 174 bytes long and the efficiency is 0.85.

Figure 4-19. Efficiency of Ethernet at 10 Mbps with 512-bit slot times.

To determine the mean number of stations ready to transmit under conditions of high load, we can use the following (crude) observation. Each frame ties up the channel for one contention period and one frame transmission time, for a total of P + w sec. The number of frames per second is therefore 1/(P + w). If each station generates frames at a mean rate of l frames/sec, then when the system is in state k, the total input rate of all unblocked stations combined is kl frames/sec. Since in equilibrium the input and output rates must be identical, we can equate these two expressions and solve for k. (Notice that w is a function of k.) A more sophisticated analysis is given in (Bertsekas and Gallager, 1992).

It is probably worth mentioning that there has been a large amount of theoretical performance analysis of Ethernet (and other networks). Virtually all of this work has assumed that traffic is Poisson. As researchers have begun looking at real data, it now appears that network traffic is rarely Poisson, but self-similar (Paxson and Floyd, 1994; and Willinger et al., 1995). What this means is that averaging over long periods of time does not smooth out the traffic. The average number of frames in each minute of an hour has as much variance as the average number of frames in each second of a minute. The consequence of this discovery is that most models of network traffic do not apply to the real world and should be taken with a grain (or better yet, a metric ton) of salt.

4.3.6 Switched Ethernet

As more and more stations are added to an Ethernet, the traffic will go up. Eventually, the LAN will saturate. One way out is to go to a higher speed, say, from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps. But with the growth of multimedia, even a 100-Mbps or 1-Gbps Ethernet can become saturated.

Fortunately, there is an additional way to deal with increased load: switched Ethernet, as shown in Fig. 4-20. The heart of this system is a switch containing a high-speed backplane and room for typically 4 to 32 plug-in line cards, each containing one to eight connectors. Most often, each connector has a 10Base-T twisted pair connection to a single host computer.

Figure 4-20. A simple example of switched Ethernet.

When a station wants to transmit an Ethernet frame, it outputs a standard frame to the switch. The plug-in card getting the frame may check to see if it is destined for one of the other stations connected to the same card. If so, the frame is copied there. If not, the frame is sent over the high-speed backplane to the destination station's card. The backplane typically runs at many Gbps, using a proprietary protocol.

What happens if two machines attached to the same plug-in card transmit frames at the same time? It depends on how the card has been constructed. One possibility is for all the ports on the card to be wired together to form a local on-card LAN. Collisions on this on-card LAN will be detected and handled the same as any other collisions on a CSMA/CD network—with retransmissions using the binary exponential backoff algorithm. With this kind of plug-in card, only one transmission per card is possible at any instant, but all the cards can be transmitting in parallel. With this design, each card forms its own collision domain, independent of the others. With only one station per collision domain, collisions are impossible and performance is improved.

With the other kind of plug-in card, each input port is buffered, so incoming frames are stored in the card's on-board RAM as they arrive. This design allows all input ports to receive (and transmit) frames at the same time, for parallel, full-duplex operation, something not possible with CSMA/CD on a single channel. Once a frame has been completely received, the card can then check to see if the frame is destined for another port on the same card or for a distant port. In the former case, it can be transmitted directly to the destination. In the latter case, it must be transmitted over the backplane to the proper card. With this design, each port is a separate collision domain, so collisions do not occur. The total system throughput can often be increased by an order of magnitude over 10Base5, which has a single collision domain for the entire system.

Since the switch just expects standard Ethernet frames on each input port, it is possible to use some of the ports as concentrators. In Fig. 4-20, the port in the upper-right corner is connected not to a single station, but to a 12-port hub. As frames arrive at the hub, they contend for the ether in the usual way, including collisions and binary backoff. Successful frames make it to the switch and are treated there like any other incoming frames: they are switched to the correct output line over the high-speed backplane. Hubs are cheaper than switches, but due to falling switch prices, they are rapidly becoming obsolete. Nevertheless, legacy hubs still exist.

4.3.7 Fast Ethernet

At first, 10 Mbps seemed like heaven, just as 1200-bps modems seemed like heaven to the early users of 300-bps acoustic modems. But the novelty wore off quickly. As a kind of corollary to Parkinson's Law (''Work expands to fill the time available for its completion''), it seemed that data expanded to fill the bandwidth available for their transmission. To pump up the speed, various industry groups proposed two new ring-based optical LANs. One was called FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface) and the other was called Fibre Channel ^[]. To make a long story short, while both were used as backbone networks, neither one made the breakthrough to the desktop. In both cases, the station management was too complicated, which led to complex chips and high prices. The lesson that should have been learned here was KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid).

^[] It is called ''fibre channel'' and not ''fiber channel'' because the document editor was British.

In any event, the failure of the optical LANs to catch fire left a gap for garden-variety Ethernet at speeds above 10 Mbps. Many installations needed more bandwidth and thus had numerous 10-Mbps LANs connected by a maze of repeaters, bridges, routers, and gateways, although to the network managers it sometimes felt that they were being held together by bubble gum and chicken wire.

It was in this environment that IEEE reconvened the 802.3 committee in 1992 with instructions to come up with a faster LAN. One proposal was to keep 802.3 exactly as it was, but just make it go faster. Another proposal was to redo it totally to give it lots of new features, such as real-time traffic and digitized voice, but just keep the old name (for marketing reasons). After some wrangling, the committee decided to keep 802.3 the way it was, but just make it go faster. The people behind the losing proposal did what any computer-industry people would have done under these circumstances—they stomped off and formed their own committee and standardized their LAN anyway (eventually as 802.12). It flopped miserably.

The 802.3 committee decided to go with a souped-up Ethernet for three primary reasons:

1. The need to be backward compatible with existing Ethernet LANs.
2. The fear that a new protocol might have unforeseen problems.
3. The desire to get the job done before the technology changed.

The work was done quickly (by standards committees' norms), and the result, 802.3u, was officially approved by IEEE in June 1995. Technically, 802.3u is not a new standard, but an addendum to the existing 802.3 standard (to emphasize its backward compatibility). Since practically everyone calls it fast Ethernet, rather than 802.3u, we will do that, too.

The basic idea behind fast Ethernet was simple: keep all the old frame formats, interfaces, and procedural rules, but just reduce the bit time from 100 nsec to 10 nsec. Technically, it would have been possible to copy either 10Base-5 or 10Base-2 and still detect collisions on time by just reducing the maximum cable length by a factor of ten. However, the advantages of 10Base-T wiring were so overwhelming that fast Ethernet is based entirely on this design. Thus, all fast Ethernet systems use hubs and switches; multidrop cables with vampire taps or BNC connectors are not permitted.

Nevertheless, some choices still had to be made, the most important being which wire types to support. One contender was category 3 twisted pair. The argument for it was that practically every office in the Western world has at least four category 3 (or better) twisted pairs running from it to a telephone wiring closet within 100 meters. Sometimes two such cables exist. Thus, using category 3 twisted pair would make it possible to wire up desktop computers using fast Ethernet without having to rewire the building, an enormous advantage for many organizations.

The main disadvantage of category 3 twisted pair is its inability to carry 200 megabaud signals (100 Mbps with Manchester encoding) 100 meters, the maximum computer-to-hub distance specified for 10Base-T (see Fig. 4-13). In contrast, category 5 twisted pair wiring can handle 100 meters easily, and fiber can go much farther. The compromise chosen was to allow all three possibilities, as shown in Fig. 4-21, but to pep up the category 3 solution to give it the additional carrying capacity needed.

Figure 4-21. The original fast Ethernet cabling.

The category 3 UTP scheme, called 100Base-T4, uses a signaling speed of 25 MHz, only 25 percent faster than standard Ethernet's 20 MHz (remember that Manchester encoding, as shown in Fig. 4-16, requires two clock periods for each of the 10 million bits each second). However, to achieve the necessary bandwidth, 100Base-T4 requires four twisted pairs. Since standard telephone wiring for decades has had four twisted pairs per cable, most offices are able to handle this. Of course, it means giving up your office telephone, but that is surely a small price to pay for faster e-mail.

Of the four twisted pairs, one is always to the hub, one is always from the hub, and the other two are switchable to the current transmission direction. To get the necessary bandwidth, Manchester encoding is not used, but with modern clocks and such short distances, it is no longer needed. In addition, ternary signals are sent, so that during a single clock period the wire can contain a 0, a 1, or a 2. With three twisted pairs going in the forward direction and ternary signaling, any one of 27 possible symbols can be transmitted, making it possible to send 4 bits with some redundancy. Transmitting 4 bits in each of the 25 million clock cycles per second gives the necessary 100 Mbps. In addition, there is always a 33.3-Mbps reverse channel using the remaining twisted pair. This scheme, known as 8B/6T (8 bits map to 6 trits), is not likely to win any prizes for elegance, but it works with the existing wiring plant.

For category 5 wiring, the design, 100Base-TX, is simpler because the wires can handle clock rates of 125 MHz. Only two twisted pairs per station are used, one to the hub and one from it. Straight binary coding is not used; instead a scheme called used4B/5Bis It is taken from FDDI and compatible with it. Every group of five clock periods, each containing one of two signal values, yields 32 combinations. Sixteen of these combinations are used to transmit the four bit groups 0000, 0001, 0010, ..., 1111. Some of the remaining 16 are used for control purposes such as marking frames boundaries. The combinations used have been carefully chosen to provide enough transitions to maintain clock synchronization. The 100Base-TX system is full duplex; stations can transmit at 100 Mbps and receive at 100 Mbps at the same time. Often 100Base-TX and 100Base-T4 are collectively referred to as 100Base-T.

The last option, 100Base-FX, uses two strands of multimode fiber, one for each direction, so it, too, is full duplex with 100 Mbps in each direction. In addition, the distance between a station and the hub can be up to 2 km.

In response to popular demand, in 1997 the 802 committee added a new cabling type, 100Base-T2, allowing fast Ethernet to run over two pairs of existing category 3 wiring. However, a sophisticated digital signal processor is needed to handle the encoding scheme required, making this option fairly expensive. So far, it is rarely used due to its complexity, cost, and the fact that many office buildings have already been rewired with category 5 UTP.

Two kinds of interconnection devices are possible with 100Base-T: hubs and switches, as shown in Fig. 4-20. In a hub, all the incoming lines (or at least all the lines arriving at one plug-in card) are logically connected, forming a single collision domain. All the standard rules, including the binary exponential backoff algorithm, apply, so the system works just like old-fashioned Ethernet. In particular, only one station at a time can be transmitting. In other words, hubs require half-duplex communication.

In a switch, each incoming frame is buffered on a plug-in line card and passed over a high-speed backplane from the source card to the destination card if need be. The backplane has not been standardized, nor does it need to be, since it is entirely hidden deep inside the switch. If past experience is any guide, switch vendors will compete vigorously to produce ever faster backplanes in order to improve system throughput. Because 100Base-FX cables are too long for the normal Ethernet collision algorithm, they must be connected to switches, so each one is a collision domain unto itself. Hubs are not permitted with 100Base-FX.

As a final note, virtually all switches can handle a mix of 10-Mbps and 100-Mbps stations, to make upgrading easier. As a site acquires more and more 100-Mbps workstations, all it has to do is buy the necessary number of new line cards and insert them into the switch. In fact, the standard itself provides a way for two stations to automatically negotiate the optimum speed (10 or 100 Mbps) and duplexity (half or full). Most fast Ethernet products use this feature to autoconfigure themselves.

4.3.8 Gigabit Ethernet

The ink was barely dry on the fast Ethernet standard when the 802 committee began working on a yet faster Ethernet (1995). It was quickly dubbed gigabit Ethernet and was ratified by IEEE in 1998 under the name 802.3z. This identifier suggests that gigabit Ethernet is going to be the end of the line unless somebody quickly invents a new letter after z. Below we will discuss some of the key features of gigabit Ethernet. More information can be found in (Seifert, 1998).

The 802.3z committee's goals were essentially the same as the 802.3u committee's goals: make Ethernet go 10 times faster yet remain backward compatible with all existing Ethernet standards. In particular, gigabit Ethernet had to offer unacknowledged datagram service with both unicast and multicast, use the same 48-bit addressing scheme already in use, and maintain the same frame format, including the minimum and maximum frame sizes. The final standard met all these goals.

All configurations of gigabit Ethernet are point-to-point rather than multidrop as in the original 10 Mbps standard, now honored as classic Ethernet. In the simplest gigabit Ethernet configuration, illustrated in Fig. 4-22(a), two computers are directly connected to each other. The more common case, however, is having a switch or a hub connected to multiple computers and possibly additional switches or hubs, as shown in Fig. 4-22(b). In both configurations each individual Ethernet cable has exactly two devices on it, no more and no fewer.

Figure 4-22. (a) A two-station Ethernet. (b) A multistation Ethernet.

Gigabit Ethernet supports two different modes of operation: full-duplex mode and half-duplex mode. The ''normal'' mode is full-duplex mode, which allows traffic in both directions at the same time. This mode is used when there is a central switch connected to computers (or other switches) on the periphery. In this configuration, all lines are buffered so each computer and switch is free to send frames whenever it wants to. The sender does not have to sense the channel to see if anybody else is using it because contention is impossible. On the line between a computer and a switch, the computer is the only possible sender on that line to the switch and the transmission succeeds even if the switch is currently sending a frame to the computer (because the line is full duplex). Since no contention is possible, the CSMA/CD protocol is not used, so the maximum length of the cable is determined by signal strength issues rather than by how long it takes for a noise burst to propagate back to the sender in the worst case. Switches are free to mix and match speeds. Autoconfiguration is supported just as in fast Ethernet.

The other mode of operation, half-duplex, is used when the computers are connected to a hub rather than a switch. A hub does not buffer incoming frames. Instead, it electrically connects all the lines internally, simulating the multidrop cable used in classic Ethernet. In this mode, collisions are possible, so the standard CSMA/CD protocol is required. Because a minimum (i.e., 64-byte) frame can now be transmitted 100 times faster than in classic Ethernet, the maximum distance is 100 times less, or 25 meters, to maintain the essential property that the sender is still transmitting when the noise burst gets back to it, even in the worst case. With a 2500-meter-long cable, the sender of a 64-byte frame at 1 Gbps would be long done before the frame got even a tenth of the way to the other end, let alone to the end and back.

The 802.3z committee considered a radius of 25 meters to be unacceptable and added two features to the standard to increase the radius. The first feature, called carrier extension, essentially tells the hardware to add its own padding after the normal frame to extend the frame to 512 bytes. Since this padding is added by the sending hardware and removed by the receiving hardware, the software is unaware of it, meaning that no changes are needed to existing software. Of course, using 512 bytes worth of bandwidth to transmit 46 bytes of user data (the payload of a 64-byte frame) has a line efficiency of 9%.

The second feature, called frame bursting, allows a sender to transmit a concatenated sequence of multiple frames in a single transmission. If the total burst is less than 512 bytes, the hardware pads it again. If enough frames are waiting for transmission, this scheme is highly efficient and preferred over carrier extension. These new features extend the radius of the network to 200 meters, which is probably enough for most offices.

In all fairness, it is hard to imagine an organization going to the trouble of buying and installing gigabit Ethernet cards to get high performance and then connecting the computers with a hub to simulate classic Ethernet with all its collisions. While hubs are somewhat cheaper than switches, gigabit Ethernet interface cards are still relatively expensive. To then economize by buying a cheap hub and slash the performance of the new system is foolish. Still, backward compatibility is sacred in the computer industry, so the 802.3z committee was required to put it in.

Gigabit Ethernet supports both copper and fiber cabling, as listed in Fig. 4-23. Signaling at or near 1 Gbps over fiber means that the light source has to be turned on and off in under 1 nsec. LEDs simply cannot operate this fast, so lasers are required. Two wavelengths are permitted: 0.85 microns (Short) and 1.3 microns (Long). Lasers at 0.85 microns are cheaper but do not work on single-mode fiber.

Figure 4-23. Gigabit Ethernet cabling.

Three fiber diameters are permitted: 10, 50, and 62.5 microns. The first is for single mode and the last two are for multimode. Not all six combinations are allowed, however, and the maximum distance depends on the combination used. The numbers given in Fig. 4-23 are for the best case. In particular, 5000 meters is only achievable with 1.3 micron lasers operating over 10 micron fiber in single mode, but this is the best choice for campus backbones and is expected to be popular, despite its being the most expensive choice.

The 1000Base-CX option uses short shielded copper cables. Its problem is that it is competing with high-performance fiber from above and cheap UTP from below. It is unlikely to be used much, if at all.

The last option is bundles of four category 5 UTP wires working together. Because so much of this wiring is already installed, it is likely to be the poor man's gigabit Ethernet.

Gigabit Ethernet uses new encoding rules on the fibers. Manchester encoding at 1 Gbps would require a 2 Gbaud signal, which was considered too difficult and also too wasteful of bandwidth. Instead a new scheme, called 8B/10B, was chosen, based on fibre channel. Each 8-bit byte is encoded on the fiber as 10 bits, hence the name 8B/10B. Since there are 1024 possible output codewords for each input byte, some leeway was available in choosing which codewords to allow. The following two rules were used in making the choices:

1. No codeword may have more than four identical bits in a row.
2. No codeword may have more than six 0s or six 1s.

These choices were made to keep enough transitions in the stream to make sure the receiver stays in sync with the sender and also to keep the number of 0s and 1s on the fiber as close to equal as possible. In addition, many input bytes have two possible codewords assigned to them. When the encoder has a choice of codewords, it always chooses the codeword that moves in the direction of equalizing the number of 0s and 1s transmitted so far. This emphasis of balancing 0s and 1s is needed to keep the DC component of the signal as low as possible to allow it to pass through transformers unmodified. While computer scientists are not fond of having the properties of transformers dictate their coding schemes, life is like that sometimes.

Gigabit Ethernets using 1000Base-T use a different encoding scheme since clocking data onto copper wire in 1 nsec is too difficult. This solution uses four category 5 twisted pairs to allow four symbols to be transmitted in parallel. Each symbol is encoded using one of five voltage levels. This scheme allows a single symbol to encode 00, 01, 10, 11, or a special value for control purposes. Thus, there are 2 data bits per twisted pair or 8 data bits per clock cycle. The clock runs at 125 MHz, allowing 1-Gbps operation. The reason for allowing five voltage levels instead of four is to have combinations left over for framing and control purposes.

A speed of 1 Gbps is quite fast. For example, if a receiver is busy with some other task for even 1 msec and does not empty the input buffer on some line, up to 1953 frames may have accumulated there in that 1 ms gap. Also, when a computer on a gigabit Ethernet is shipping data down the line to a computer on a classic Ethernet, buffer overruns are very likely. As a consequence of these two observations, gigabit Ethernet supports flow control (as does fast Ethernet, although the two are different).

The flow control consists of one end sending a special control frame to the other end telling it to pause for some period of time. Control frames are normal Ethernet frames containing a type of 0x8808. The first two bytes of the data field give the command; succeeding bytes provide the parameters, if any. For flow control, PAUSE frames are used, with the parameter telling how long to pause, in units of the minimum frame time. For gigabit Ethernet, the time unit is 512 nsec, allowing for pauses as long as 33.6 msec.

As soon as gigabit Ethernet was standardized, the 802 committee got bored and wanted to get back to work. IEEE told them to start on 10-gigabit Ethernet. After searching hard for a letter to follow z, they abandoned that approach and went over to two-letter suffixes. They got to work and that standard was approved by IEEE in 2002 as 802.3ae. Can 100-gigabit Ethernet be far behind?

4.3.9 IEEE 802.2: Logical Link Control

It is now perhaps time to step back and compare what we have learned in this chapter with what we studied in the previous one. These protocols provided error control (using acknowledgements) and flow control (using a sliding window).

In contrast, in this chapter, we have not said a word about reliable communication. All that Ethernet and the other 802 protocols offer is a best-efforts datagram service. Sometimes, this service is adequate. For example, for transporting IP packets, no guarantees are required or even expected. An IP packet can just be inserted into an 802 payload field and sent on its way. If it gets lost, so be it.

Nevertheless, there are also systems in which an error-controlled, flow-controlled data link protocol is desired. IEEE has defined one that can run on top of Ethernet and the other 802 protocols. In addition, this protocol, called LLC (Logical Link Control), hides the differences between the various kinds of 802 networks by providing a single format and interface to the network layer. LLC forms the upper half of the data link layer, with the MAC sublayer below it, as shown in Fig. 4-24.

Figure 4-24. (a) Position of LLC. (b) Protocol formats.

Typical usage of LLC is as follows. The network layer on the sending machine passes a packet to LLC, using the LLC access primitives. The LLC sublayer then adds an LLC header, containing sequence and acknowledgement numbers. The resulting structure is then inserted into the payload field of an 802 frame and transmitted. At the receiver, the reverse process takes place.

LLC provides three service options: unreliable datagram service, acknowledged datagram service, and reliable connection-oriented service. The LLC header contains three fields: a destination access point, a source access point, and a control field. The access points tell which process the frame came from and where it is to be delivered, replacing the DIX Type field. The control field contains sequence and acknowledgement numbers, very much in the style of HDLC (see Fig. 3-24), but not identical to it.For the Internet, best-efforts attempts to deliver IP packets is sufficient, so no acknowledgements at the LLC level are required.

4.3.10 Retrospective on Ethernet

Ethernet has been around for over 20 years and has no serious competitors in sight, so it is likely to be around for many years to come. Few CPU architectures, operating systems, or programming languages have been king of the mountain for two decades going on three. Clearly, Ethernet did something right. What?

Probably the main reason for its longevity is that Ethernet is simple and flexible. In practice, simple translates into reliable, cheap, and easy to maintain. Once the vampire taps were replaced by BNC connectors, failures became extremely rare. People hesitate to replace something that works perfectly all the time, especially when they know that an awful lot of things in the computer industry work very poorly, so that many so-called ''upgrades'' are appreciably worse than what they replaced.

Simple also translates into cheap. Thin Ethernet and twisted pair wiring is relatively inexpensive. The interface cards are also low cost. Only when hubs and switches were introduced were substantial investments required, but by the time they were in the picture, Ethernet was already well established.

Ethernet is easy to maintain. There is no software to install (other than the drivers) and there are no configuration tables to manage (and get wrong). Also, adding new hosts is as simple as just plugging them in.

Another point is that Ethernet interworks easily with TCP/IP, which has become dominant. IP is a connectionless protocol, so it fits perfectly with Ethernet, which is also connectionless. IP fits much less well with ATM, which is connection oriented. This mismatch definitely hurt ATM's chances.

Lastly, Ethernet has been able to evolve in certain crucial ways. Speeds have gone up by several orders of magnitude and hubs and switches have been introduced, but these changes have not required changing the software. When a network salesman shows up at a large installation and says: ''I have this fantastic new network for you. All you have to do is throw out all your hardware and rewrite all your software,'' he has a problem. FDDI, Fibre Channel, and ATM were all faster than Ethernet when introduced, but they were incompatible with Ethernet, far more complex, and harder to manage. Eventually, Ethernet caught up with them in terms of speed, so they had no advantages left and quietly died off except for ATM's use deep within the core of the telephone system.