Professional Masters Degree Program

CSE 588, Network Systems, Spring 1997

Term Paper #1 -- The Compilation

Sorted by Paper Number Sorted by Topic To the home High Speed Networks Firewalls Multimedia Hybrid Switching Other

Sorted by topic

To the home

ISDN vs. Frame Relay for Small LAN Internet Access (Overview)
Competing For That Last Mile -- A comparison of high-speed data technologies: Cable vs. xDSL (Overview)
High-Speed at Home: Cable vs. Telco's xDSL (Overview)
56-kbps modem technology VS IDSN (Overview)
Internet Connection Options For The Home (Overview)
Megabit Data Networks to the Home (Overview)

High Speed Networks

A comparison of the Fibre Channel and SerialExpress standards (Overview)
Comparison of Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet Networking Technologies (Overview)
Gigabit Ethernet: A Replacement for ATM? (Overview)
Fast Ethernet vs FDDI (Overview)
Multicast over ATM (Overview)
Fibre Channel vs. ATM (Overview)

Firewalls

Firewalls (Overview)
Firewall Technologies: A Comparative Study (Overview)
Firewalls (Overview)
Firewalls (Overview)
Firewalls (Overview)

Multimedia

Multimedia Streaming on the Internet - A Comparison of Two Solutions (Overview)
Data Multicasting via TV Broadcast Networks: Intel Intercast vs. Microsoft IP/NABTS (Overview)

Hybrid Switching

A Comparison of IP Switching Technologies from 3Com, Cascade, and IBM. (Overview)
A Comparison of Hybrid Switching Systems (Overview)
Comparison of Two Shortcut Routing Schemes: Multi-Protocol Over ATM vs. Fast IP (Overview)
IP Switching & Tag Switching: Two Fast IP Strategies (Overview)

Other

A comparison of the CEBus's HPnP and the BACnet protocols for home and building control (Overview)
Comparing SNMPv2 with SNMPv1 (Overview)
Technologies and Techniques for Network Game Play or Pong on the Internet? (Overview)
Multicast Support via IGMP vs. 802.1Q VLANs (Overview)

Sorted by paper number

ISDN vs. Frame Relay for Small LAN Internet Access (Top)
Say you are the owner of "The Kirkland Microbrewery", and you wish to establish a presence on the Internet. Being a former Microsoft employee, you are quite computer literate, and plan to set things up in house, using your own LAN. You see no need to pay an Internet presence provider a lot of money for services and bandwidth which you don't really need. You plan to have a web site on which to advertise your brews and special events; the site will gets hits, but the traffic will be relatively low. Also, you plan to run a few mailing lists, to announce events and discuss your brewing processes with interested customers. You feel that it is important for all of your brewers to also have email, news, and web access as well; it's important for them to be able to communicate with your customers. Looking at your requirements for incoming and outgoing bandwidth, you estimate that you will need a connection in the 56 to 128 kbps (kilobits per second) range. There are two technologies that you would consider for this connection: ISDN and Frame Relay.
A comparison of the Fibre Channel and SerialExpress standards (Top)
The need to transport high volumes of data at Gbit speeds has led to the invention of new connection technologies. While Gbit ethernet has received a lot of press recently as the solution to this problem, several other technologies have emerged as potential contenders. One of these is Fibre Channel. Fibre Channel was established as a family of ANSI standards in 1995. Hardware to support this standard has been available since that time. A dark horse contender in the race to claim the high-speed connection race is the SerialExpress technology. The definition of the SerialExpress standard was started in 1996 in response to perceived deficiencies in the IEEE1394 (FireWire) standard. It will take several years before the SerialExpress technology is ready for use. It is being described here because it comes at the problem of transporting data at high speeds from a different perspective.
Firewalls (Top)
Data security is an important issue for all organizations. When an organization connects to the Internet, they have created a pathway for data to flow in and out. A firewall is a tool that can be used to restrict the flow of data between a n internal network and the external network. There are two main types of firewalls: Network-level firewalls which filter packets as they pass through the firewall, and Application-level firewalls that process the content of the data being sent and then resend as appropriate.

Network-level firewalls process data fast when simple rule sets are used; they are also transparent to the end users. With complex setups, performance and security may be degraded. Application-level firewalls allow for higher levels of security, whic h come at the cost of performance and price. An organization must look at its security needs to determine which type of firewall, or a combination of both types, will meet their needs.

Multimedia Streaming on the Internet - A Comparison of Two Solutions (Top)
The Internet offers content providers a vast potential audience. However, the traditional Internet protocols constrained data delivery to a client-initiated pull model such that every client had its own connection to the data source. To facilitate a push model of delivery while avoiding bandwidth saturation, the IETF approved a new set of protocols designed to provide IP multicast capabilities. Applications built on top of these protocols can stream data across the network and any interested client node can receive it without an explicit connection to the source. Two such applications, Microsoft(R) NetShow (TM) and RealVideo(TM) from Progressive Networks, are competing in both the Internet and corporate Intranet arenas. Both applications have wide industry support. NetShow currently provides a wider range of data types and compression mechanisms, but RealVideo may still influence future developments of the technology because it is the first member of the RealMedia architecture family.
Comparison of Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet Networking Technologies (Top)
The topic of this term paper is related to the two high speed technologies, the Fibre Channel and the Gigabit Ethernet, that emerge recently as a solution to solve the congestion of the overload network backbone. Most of the information is from the existing trade publications, and (draft) specifications. The topics related to these technologies have been shown in many articles and magazines. I would like to take this opportunity to re-exam some of the similarities and differences of these technologies, specially in their protocol layers and topologies.
56-kbps modem technology VS IDSN (Top)
It is sometimes hard to believe that the Internet phenomenon has exploded so rapidly. With the exponentially increasing popularity of the WWW and the Internet, more and more people are getting online, checking e-mail, and surfing the Web. All o f this creates a need for speed -- a faster connection to the Internet, so that less time is spent waiting for text and pictures to be downloaded to your browser computer.

There is a multitude of types of connections that can be used to link up to the Internet: from 28.8-kbps / 36.6-kbps V.34 modems, to frame relay, to IDSN, to T-1 connections. In general, the faster the connection, the more expensive it is to set up and to keep connected. Recently a new technology has been invented that attempts to provide the speed of a frame relay or IDSN connection (56-kbps) at price of a normal modem. This paper will take a look at the new 56-kbps modem technology, and compare it wi th existing IDSN technology.

Firewall Technologies: A Comparative Study (Top)
A firewall is defined as a collection of components placed between 2 networks that collectively have the following components:
  • All traffic from inside to outside, and vice versa, must pass through the firewall.
  • Only authorized traffic, as defined by the local security policy, will be allowed to pass.
  • The firewall itself is immune to penetration.
The goal of a good firewall product is to provide good performance (since it is a bottleneck in the network), network security and application transparency. Additional features include logging capabilities and security features like detection of IP spoofing.
A comparison of the CEBus's HPnP and the BACnet protocols for home and building control (Top)
There are two popular application level standards for home and building automation, BACNet and CEBus. BACNet, Building Automation and Control Network, is targeted at larger scale industrial applications like office buildings or campus settings. CEBuss CAL, Consumer Electronics Bus, Common Application Language, is seen as a protocol exclusively for home automation. Within the home/building automation industry, these two protocols seem to have completely different applications.

However, from first glance, these protocols seem to have more similarities than differences. They both allow for integration of currently disparate home and office subsystems. They both view devices on the network as collections of objects. They are both connectionless. Finally, they both sit on top of a protocol stack that allow for various lower layer protocols and media types.

This paper will compare and contrast the two application level protocols. I will try to see if they are truly the same thing or if they have major differences making them unsuitable for each others job.

Firewalls (Top)
The first section of this document gives a brief overview of what a firewall, and what components go into creating one. The second section provides some insight into the most common firewall architectures, along with the pros and cons of each. The third section describes one company's firewall configuration and discusses the rationale for the configuration. The last section compares two of the leading firewall products: CheckPoint's FireWall-1 and Trusted Information System's Gauntlet.
Competing For That Last Mile -- A comparison of high-speed data technologies: Cable vs. xDSL (Top)
Tired of the World Wide Wait? The advent of the Internet has taken the residential communication technology to its knees. Even with the fastest of the modems available today, Internet access is by no means "a breeze" even for the least demanding of the web surfers. Two emerging high-speed data access technologies on the horizon are capable of satisfying the information hunger: Cable TV (CATV) and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology. The Cable TV strategy uses the cable television infrastructure t o send data to and from the computer while the Digital Subscriber Line technology uses the regular telephone lines to achieve the same. Supporters of either technology are widespread, with telephone companies on one side for the DSL technology and the c able companies on the other for the cable technology. This paper makes an attempt at comparing the two competing technologies with the hope that such an exercise will bring some understanding on the issues at stake.
A Comparison of IP Switching Technologies from 3Com, Cascade, and IBM. (Top)
Network usage continues to grow rapidly. Web-based computing and an ever increasing number of users has brought unprecedented challenges to network infrastructures. LAN switching is currently a popular and cost effective means of increasing bandwidth. However, it creates new problems. For example, conventional routers can't handle the increased traffic made possible by the high performance switches. Further, emerging real-time applications such as video conferencing loom on the horizon which will require massive bandwidth as well as high quality of service. Are faster routers and larger pipes, e.g., gigabit Ethernet, the way to go? Ideally, we would really like to have something that scales well into the future and provides good QoS. ATM hardware looks promising but, being connection-oriented, it doesn't mesh well with connectionless IP. A number of ways have been concocted to run IP on top of ATM, none of which are very satisfying because they don't take the most advantage of ATM. They are either too complex, inefficient, and/or don't scale well. But in early 1996 a startup company, Ipsilon Networks, introduced an elegant solution to this problem which they called IP Switching. Industry has since then accepted it. Some companies license it from Ipsilon while others have created their own versions of it with different twists. Indeed, a number of them provide some sort of "cut-through" switching over other link-level technologies, not just ATM. In this paper we compare the offerings from 3Com, Cascade and IBM who have recently joined forces to provide an integrated, end-to-end, desktop to LAN to WAN to LAN to server IP switching solution.
A Comparison of Hybrid Switching Systems (Top)
The essential function of a data network is to forward packets from source to destination. Traditionally there have been two distinct mechanisms used for packet forwarding, switching at the data-link layer, or layer 2, and routing at the network layer, or layer 3. Switches are usually engineered to have low cost, high performance, and low management overhead. In contrast, routers are typically designed to provide greater functionality, control and configurability at the expense of these other factors. Consequently, common network architectures use switches within small local administrative domains, and routers to control traffic across these domains.

The first real attack on this architecture came from ATM, which was designed as a switched data-link layer protocol with additional signaling protocols to manage large networks end-to-end. ATM was not successful at displacing existing architectures, in part because its connection oriented model was a poor match for the popular datagram model employed by IP and IPX. Nevertheless, the desire to take advantage of low cost scalable ATM switching hardware was clearly a major factor leading to the development of new ``hybrid switching'' systems.

In this paper, I'll discuss three such systems, Ipsilon's IP Switching, Cisco's Tag Switching, and 3Com's Fast IP. Each of these schemes provides a different way of mapping the network layer forwarding mechanism onto the data-link layer. The primary goal in this mapping process is to take advantage of the lower cost and higher performance that comes from hardware forwarding implementations. For each system I will concentrate on issues relating to scalability and support for Quality of Service (Qos). I will not discuss hardware support for network layer routing (ala Rapid City), although the emergence of such hardware may challenge the implicit economic assumption behind hybrid switching.

Fast Ethernet vs FDDI (Top)
In the following, we compare the two competing LAN technologies, Fast Ethernet and FDDI [1][2]. Both of them are originated from the two longtime rival technologies, Ethernet and Token Ring respectively [1][2][3]. In addition, both approaches are technically sound and being used successfully in the real world with its technical advantages and disadvantages. But it seems to us that Fast Ethernet probably is the better one because it is technologically as competitive, relatively simpler, easier to maintain and more cost effective.
Comparing SNMPv2 with SNMPv1 (Top)
SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) v1 was designed in the mid to late 1980s as a short term solution to allow the management of TCP/IP-based internets. In the long-term, the use of the OSI network management framework was to be examined. However, SNMPv1 became the network management protocol of choice as no better choice became available.

In the early 1990s work began to define SNMPv2 which would extend the capabilities of v1, and fix some of its deficiencies. However as the protocol became less simple (initial specifications for SNMPv2 were 400+ pages compared to the 36 pages for SNMPv1) progress slowed and some industry members complained about the complexity. A rewritten set of RFCs was published in late 1995. Most notably this extended the protocol to solve some of the performance deficiencies of SNMPv1.

However the working group failed to reach agreement on the key areas of security and administrative framework. As a result SNMPv2 has not been accepted by the industry as a de facto standard in the way that SNMPv1 was and work continues to define a new standard.

This report gives an introduction to the capabilities of SNMPv1. It then lists the major issues that SNMPv2 was supposed to address, and describes the areas where agreement was reached. Finally it briefly summarizes the differences between the two main v2 security factions.

High-Speed at Home: Cable vs. Telco's xDSL (Top)
A network connection is only as fast as its slowest link. For home networking, this has historically been the connection between the personal computer and the network service provider. This connection is generally through a phone line using either an analog or digital modem.

Today the state of the art for analog modems is at 56.6 kbps. These modems are just hitting the streets and their actual performance is largely dependent on how clean the phone line connection is. Digital modems are rated at 128 kbps using ISDN. These modems require ISDN service from the telephone service provider and have been known to be very difficult to set up and manage.

As demand for bandwidth continues to increase with the growing use of the Internet and more demanding applications, subscribers will have one fundamental choice on selecting their service provider. This is whether to receive wire network service over a cable modem or a DSL modem.

This choice is positioning the phone companies in direct competition with the cable companies. Both industries are eagerly trying to provide a service which is technologically superior to the other, competitively priced, and most importantly, utilizes the enormous infrastructure both industries already have in place (that is, copper cable and Hybrid Fiber/Coax HFC). This also positions the equipment manufacturers against one another to deliver competitive technologically advanced products.

This paper examines these two fundamental approaches. It describes the underlying capabilities and technology associated to both approaches. Issues and standards will also be addressed. The choice of wireless technology using direct broadcast satellites is not covered by this paper.

Comparison of Two Shortcut Routing Schemes: Multi-Protocol Over ATM vs. Fast IP (Top)
During the past year a number of schemes have emerged to solve the router bottleneck problem by avoiding or minimizing packet by packet handling of data by routers. In this paper we study two such schemes: ATM Forum's Multi-Protocol Over ATM and 3Com's Fast IP. Both MPOA and Fast IP are flow based schemes, i.e. shortcut is set up based on the volume of traffic going to a particular end station. Both MPOA and Fast IP are primarily meant for campus LAN environment. MPOA is an ATM only solution while Fast IP also works with packet switched networks. MPOA is based on two core technologies, LANE and NHRP. LANE provides emulated LANs that emulate the services of Ethernet and token ring LANs across an ATM network. NHRP is an address resolution protocol that permits queries between different emulated LANs. NHRP allows MPOA devices in one subnet (VLAN) to set up direct (layer-2) connections to MPOA devices in another subnet thus avoiding hop by hop handling of packets by routers. Like MPOA, Fast IP also uses a variation of NHRP to enable two systems on different VLANs to communicate directly.

Both MPOA and Fast IP currently do not have any explicit support for Quality of Service, however both have plans in place for future support. There are some concerns about the scalability of these schemes to WANs which haven't been fully addressed yet. Both these schemes offer significant cost benefits in the campus LAN environment as they can simplify inter-VLAN communications and reduce the role of routers, which should translate into a need for fewer router ports. In both these schemes no changes are required at the core of the network and only the edge devices are affected. Initially both these schemes will only support IP, however they can be extended to use any other network protocol. Networks with filtering and firewalls have to do the "policing" during the setup of the shortcut as there is no way to monitor the network once the shortcut has been established.

MPOA , Fast IP, and other shortcut routing schemes are in their evolutionary stages and it will be some time before these schemes stabilize and industry has enough experience to determine which scheme lives up to its promise.

Data Multicasting via TV Broadcast Networks: Intel Intercast vs. Microsoft IP/NABTS (Top)
Competition is brewing in the PC and broadcast industries over a data network everyone has access to but very few people even know to exist: broadcast television. TV broadcasts include a little known medium-bandwidth, unidirectional data pipe known as the vertical blanking interval, or "VBI". A small portion of the VBI is already in use today to broadcast FCC-mandated closed captioning for the hearing impaired in the U.S., and with the convergence of computing and television devices accelerating, additional uses for this bandwidth are being aggressively pursued.

This paper compares and contrasts two similar technologies seeking to utilize the VBI for transmission of Internet content: Intel Intercast, and Microsofts recent IP/NABTS proposal. At the time of this writing, this very analysis is being pursued by Hollywood producers, TV networks, and local TV broadcasters, who are all being wooed by Intel and Microsoft to endorse and adopt their respective architectures. They must decide which design offers the best potential for them to execute on their short and long-term goals to enhance programming with associated data content. This analysis requires not just an understanding of how data bits are transmitted and in what data formats, but also a variety of end-to-end considerations that impact the viability of one system over the other, such as tool availability, installed client base, market penetration, guaranteed data bandwidth, etc.

It is concluded that broadcasters and producers that believe in the concept of simul-casting Internet VBI data with video broadcasts to enhance TV programming should jump in now using Intel Intercast, because it is a functional system with readily available tools. Should IP/NABTS or some other system come along later, a transition would not be difficult, since the real investment is not in the data transmission protocols, but rather the authoring process that is sufficiently similar on both platforms.

Gigabit Ethernet: A Replacement for ATM? (Top)
As applications with high bandwidth and real-time network demands become more popular, it is necessary to reevaluate the implementation of local area networks. Although ATM was initially considered by many to be the solution of the future, it has been slow in gaining acceptance in a community dominated by connection-less networks. With the introduction of Gigabit Ethernet, the bandwidth advantage of ATM is no longer so clear. This paper evaluates Gigabit Ethernet as an alternative to ATM in the local area network. It evaluates Gigabit Ethernet on the basis of implementation, scalability, and quality of service. Analysis indicates that the technological advantage of ATM will not be sufficient to take over the LAN market, but it will sustain ATM as the solution for especially demanding environments.
Technologies and Techniques for Network Game Play or Pong on the Internet? (Top)
The biggest theme of this years Computer Game Developers Conference was gaming on the Internet. From the conference, it was apparent that there are as many ideas of how to do this successfully as people presenting them. This paper describes some of the ideas on gaming on the Internet as well as some of the different technologies and business models.
Multicast over ATM (Top)
Multicasting is an important feature of modern computer networking, and it is gaining in importance as multicast applications gain in popularity. However, whereas multicasting has been a common feature over most "classic" networking technologies for quite some time - such as Ethernet and FDDI - it is only now becoming a common feature over ATM [Asynchronous Transfer Mode] networks. As ATM becomes more popular and is more widely applied as a computer network technology, the need for ATM to support multicasting will rise.

This paper examines and compares some of the approaches which have been made to implementing multicast functionality over ATM computer networks. Although some of these proposals have not yet been fully implemented, it is nonetheless informative to look at their specifications and to compare their various approaches. An obvious requirement of any proposal for multicast over ATM is that the implementation actually work over ATM, while delivering "expected" multicast service to higher protocol layers, and we will see how the various proposals tackle this requirement. In the end, we will see that the most complete proposals, with the best chance of being realized, are those which strike a balance between the way multicast is implemented in "classical" networks today, and the requirements that ATM places on implementors.

Internet Connection Options For The Home (Top)
Today's modem speeds for consumers is too slow. Near-term options are 56kbps mod ems, ISDN, cable modems, and ADSL modems, and satellite. 56k and ISDN aren't eve n in the ballpark bandwidth-wise with the others. Cable modems and ADSL are the two viable long-term mass-market solutions.
Fibre Channel vs. ATM (Top)
Both Fibre Channel and ATM offer solutions for solving current and future network bandwidth problems. The technology that a network manager selects should be based on a careful evaluation of not only their current needs, but their future needs. For those users that transmit mostly voice and video ATM is the best choice. For those users that require high raw throughput, and can accept reasonable efficiency in the transmission of voice and video, Fibre Channel is the better choice.
Megabit Data Networks to the Home (Top)
The demand for megabit data networks to the home is increasing rapidly. The popularity explosion of the Internet and World Wide Web in the last few years is the major force behind this demand. Other important applications driving this demand include Home Shopping, Telecommuting, Interactive Video, and Video on Demand. There are two emerging technologies that provide a megabit data network to the home. The first is Digital Subscriber Loop (xDSL), and the second is Hybrid Fiber Cable (HFC). This paper compares and contrasts these two approaches.
IP Switching & Tag Switching: Two Fast IP Strategies (Top)
In the quest for larger and faster networks, driven partially by the growth of the Internet, shared media is giving way to switching. The network layer protocols have remained IP, but instead of classic Ethernet, link layer technology such as switched Ethernet, fast Ethernet, and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) are beginning to provide the pipes in which IP data travels. To date, ATM has proven a difficult platform for IP. Although ATM switches are very fast, and provide an isochronous network upon which both voice and data can be sent, adoption of ATM in the IP community has been inconsistent. Two internetworking equipment vendors have introduced technology designed to overcome some of the drawbacks of running IP over ATM, and to enable users of IP to reap the benefits of fast ATM switching technology; Ipsilon, with IP switching, and Cisco, with Tag switching. This paper offers an overview of these respective mechanisms as well as an analysis of these two approaches in terms of some key issues important to internetwork designers and engineers. The paper assumes a general understanding of the IP protocols, switching, and ATM, and a familiarity with the issues associated with the Operations, Administration, Maintenance, and Provisioning (OAM&P) of high speed local and wide-area data networks.
Multicast Support via IGMP vs. 802.1Q VLANs (Top)
This paper discusses and compares two approaches to supporting multicast: IGMP - the Internet Group Management Protocol [2], and Virtual Bridged Local Area Networks (VLANs), specified by the proposed 802.1Q IEEE standard [1]. Various strengths and weaknesses of both solutions are analyzed with respect to several essential requirements of a successful multicast specification.
Firewalls (Top)
This paper describes firewalls. It is intended to provide a basic understanding of why we need firewalls and how they work. It also illustrates the issues that are involved in planning or purchasing a firewall.
Firewalls (Top)
The Internet is a great technological advance that provides easy access to information and the ability to publish information in revolutionary ways; but it's also a major danger that provides the ability to pollute and destroy information in revolutionary ways. This paper describes one way to balance the advantages and the risks, in order to participate in the Internet while still protecting yourself. The discussion provides a detailed overview that focuses on the variety of relevant issues, recommends strategies for coping with these, and compares their respective advantages and disadvantages. It is not within scope, however, to present the products of specific vendors, since the underlying technologies are rapidly evolving.



Sorted by Paper Number Sorted by Topic To the home High Speed Networks Firewalls Multimedia Hybrid Switching Other

Note: 99% of the text on this page was not written by me and comes straight from the paper. Neither the University of Washington nor the Computer Science Department endorses the products described herein. All trademarks contained herein are hereby acknowledged as the property of the holder of that trademark. This page was written with EMACS and UW Pico under ULTRIX 4.2 and has been tested under Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.