1. (POGIL Activity 1) How does the geographical distance between the source and destination hosts on a network affect latency?
Answer
The farther geographically, the the higher the latency. Other factors that may have to do with this increase include a higher number of hops for farther locations and poorer routing speed in different countries.
2. What are the benefits of packet switching?
Answer
Packet switching has benefits such as faster routing speed due to the fact that whatever is being routed is not transmitted as a whole, but as individual packets, each which travel at their optimum route to increase transmission speed.
3. (POGIL Activity 2) Missing Packets. What should happen if a packet goes missing? Who (which layer) would handle this? What action would they have to take? And what additional information would be needed in the packet in order to handle it?
Answer
If a packet were to go missing, the data would be returned to the user with an error message. The transport layer would handle this. They would need to reassemble all of the packets, re packet them, and then try the process over again.
4. (POGIL Activity 2) Security/Privacy. As the packets are being transmitted through the network, can people other than the sender and receiver read the messages? What methods can we use to protect the message?
Answer
When the packets are being transmitted, it is possible for other people to intercept and potentially read them. To protect the messages, we can use different methods of encryption- writing the messages in a kind of code language so that they cannot be read by anyone but the person they are intended for.