1. Outline
This assignment will test your knowledge with regard to the protocol stack, its working and packet headers. By the time you attempt this assignment, you should have a clear understanding of how packets are transmitted across the network. Please refer to the recommended text book for help with writing this technical report.
2. The Task
Discuss, in a report of 2000-2500 words, the network and protocol processes that occur in the network when you access X-Stream from a remote location, such as your home.
How you address this question is essentially up to you, particularly as the details of the particular system you consider will vary. However MUST should include consideration of:
• Changes to packet headers as data traverses through the protocol stack andthrough the network.
• The role of specific protocols in the context of the above task.
• The processes that occur in the end systems with respect to the data.
• What happens in the various parts of the network, as data travels between thehost and the X-Stream Server.
You don’t necessarily need to use wire-shark, but it might be useful to justify your statements with wire-shark screenshots. This is entirely up to you. You need to concentrate on the topics you learnt in the lab and the lectures. Describe the topics you learnt in context of the assignment. You need not consider in detail what happens in the Browser or Web Server.
A good answer will demonstrate a clear and concise understanding of all the processes that occur and their inter-relationships. You may wish to structure your answer around the TCP/IP stack, but this is by no means the only approach. Similarly, you may wish to take a Top-Down or a Bottom-Up approach. You could cover the topic in a “broad brush” way and then discuss some aspects of it in more detail. The approach you take is up to you.
3. What NOT to do
Avoid writing about the basics about internet, network and generic facts. These will only use up your word count. We encourage you to “dive-in” to the task at hand. We don’t want you to tell us what network protocols are. Rather, we want you to convince us that you have understood the processes involved. Keep it strictly incontext of the task given to you.
4. Deadline :Sunday 25th May 2014
You should submit your work to the Turnitin Drop Box in the home page for CCN on Blackboard. Late submissions will attract penalties of 5 marks per day.
5. Unfair Practices
Note that Turnitin can be used as a “plagiarism detector”, and it will indicate whether material has been copied, from, for example, the WWW (but note that Turnitin’s detection processes are not limited to this). Any detected plagiarism, unfair practices including ghost-writing will attract the full consideration of the University processes for dealing with it. If you are unclear about this, you may wish to peruse “The Leeds Met Little Book of Plagiarism”, available in the Library and online at
http://skillsforlearning.leedsmet.ac.uk/local/documents/resources/lbop.pdf
You may also wish to look at
http://skillsforlearning.leedsmet.ac.uk/Quote_Unquote.pdf to learn how to referencequotations correctly.