Understanding how the internet works

Today's the final test for this module that I'm doing. I liked the last 2 short answer questions that came out in the paper. Basically, the first question asked us about TCP compared with another protocol that is similar to retransmission timeout. TCP consists of Duplicated Acks and Retransmission Timeout whereas the protocol that was posted in the question consists only of RTO. I answered that the protocol is simpler and hence easier to apply in networks and hence more scalable. The cons of the protocol is that unlike TCP which has other protocols such as Duplicated Acks in order to infer traffic congestion on the internet and adjust Window Sizes accordingly to suit the traffic condition, this protocol does not have additional protocols. TCP is thus able to more efficiently utilise the available bandwidth in the network because duplicated acks allow TCP to infer that there is some traffic congestion in the network but is not as bad as that from Retransmission Timeout. Hence, it will only reduce the data transfer rate to that of the congestion avoidance phase. In contrast, upon receiving RTO, the data transfer rate would be dramatically reduced to that of slow start phase. Here's the graph that I drew for the test:










The 2nd short answer question basically asked about P2P softwares such as Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa and what are the pros and cons of these softwares. The 2nd part of the question provides us with a scenario whereby an entrepreneur devises an algorithm to combine a Gnutella network with Google Page rank search engine and ask us to comment whether this would work or not and what are the barriers to this type of algorithm.

Besides these questions, the MCQs are tough because we have to choose the correct multiple choices (not only 1 correct choice but can also be more than 1 correct choice) in order to get the full marks for the question. Many things tested were not from the syllables. For example, I did not know what a Kalman Filter device is.