Data Link Layer is second layer of OSI Layered Model. This layer is one of the most complicated layers and has complex functionalities and liabilities. Data link layer hides the details of underlying hardware and represents itself to upper layer as the medium to communicate.

Data link layer is responsible for converting data stream to signals bit by bit and to send that over the underlying hardware. At the receiving end, Data link layer picks up data from hardware which are in the form of electrical signals, assembles them in a recognizable frame format, and hands over to upper layer.

Data link layer has two sub-layers:

• Logical Link Control: It deals with protocols, flow-control, and error control
• Media Access Control: It deals with actual control of media

Functionality of Data-link Layer

Data link layer does many tasks on behalf of upper layer. These are:

i. Framing

Data-link layer takes packets from Network Layer and encapsulates them into Frames. Then, it sends each frame bit-by-bit on the hardware. At receiver’ end, data link layer picks up signals from hardware and assembles them into frames. The four framing methods that are widely used are

a. Character count

This method uses a field in the header to specify the number of characters in the frame. When the data link layer at the destination sees the character count, it knows how many characters follow, and hence where the end of the frame is.

b. Starting and ending characters, with character stuffing

In the second method, each frame starts with the ASCII character sequence DLE STX and ends with the sequence DLE ETX.(where DLE is Data Link Escape, STX is Start of TeXt and ETX is End of TeXt.) The sender's data link layer inserts an ASCII DLE character just before the DLE character in the data. The receiver's data link layer removes this DLE before this data is given to the network layer. However character stuffing is closely associated with 8-bit characters and this is a major hurdle in transmitting arbitrary sized characters.

c. Starting and ending flags, with bit stuffing

The third method allows data frames to contain an arbitrary number of bits and allows character codes with an arbitrary number of bits per character. At the start and end of each frame is a flag byte consisting of the special bit pattern 01111110. Whenever the sender's data link layer encounters five consecutive 1s in the data, it automatically stuffs a zero bit into the outgoing bit stream. This technique is called bit stuffing. When the receiver sees five consecutive 1s in the incoming data stream, followed by a zero bit, it automatically destuffs the 0 bit. The boundary between two frames can be determined by locating the flag pattern.

d. Physical layer coding violations

The final framing method is physical layer coding violations and is applicable to networks in which the encoding on the physical medium contains some redundancy. In such cases normally, a 1 bit is a high-low pair and a 0 bit is a low-high pair. The combinations of low-low and high-high which are not used for data may be used for marking frame boundaries.

ii. Error Control

Sometimes signals may have encountered problem in transition and the bits are flipped. These errors are detected and attempted to recover actual data bits. It also provides error reporting mechanism to the sender. Examples of Error Detecting methods:

a. Parity bit:

Simple example of error detection technique is parity bit. The parity bit is chosen that the number of 1 bits in the code word is either even (for even parity) or odd (for odd parity). For example when 10110101 is transmitted then for even parity an 1 will be appended to the data and for odd parity a 0 will be appended. This scheme can detect only single bits. So if two or more bits are changed then that can not be detected.

b. Cyclic Redundancy Checksum (CRC):

We have an n-bit message. The sender adds a k-bit Frame Check Sequence (FCS) to this message before sending. The resulting (n+k) bit message is divisible by some (k+1) bit number. The receiver divides the message ((n+k)-bit) by the same (k+1)-bit number and if there is no remainder, assumes that there was no error.

For example, if k=12 then 1000000000000 (13-bit number) can be chosen, but this is a pretty crappy choice. Because it will result in a zero remainder for all (n+k) bit messages with the last 12 bits zero. Thus, any bits flipping beyond the last 12 go undetected. If k=12, and we take 1110001000110 as the 13-bit number (incidentally, in decimal representation this turns out to be 7238). This will be unable to detect errors only if the corrupt message and original message have a difference of a multiple of 7238. The probablilty of this is low, much lower than the probability that anything beyond the last 12-bits flips.

iii. Flow Control

Stations on same link may have different speed or capacity. Data-link layer ensures flow control that enables both machine to exchange data on same speed.

a. Stop and Wait Protocol: This is the simplest file control protocol in which the sender transmits a frame and then waits for an acknowledgement, either positive or negative, from the receiver before proceeding. If a positive acknowledgement is received, the sender transmits the next packet; else it retransmits the same frame.

However, this protocol has one major flaw in it. If a packet or an acknowledgement is completely destroyed in transit due to a noise burst, a deadlock will occur because the sender cannot proceed until it receives an acknowledgement. This problem may be solved using timers on the sender's side. When the frame is transmitted, the timer is set. If there is no response from the receiver within a certain time interval, the timer goes off and the frame may be retransmitted.

b. Sliding Window Protocols:

In sliding window protocols the sender's data link layer maintains a ‘sliding window' which consists of a set of sequence numbers corresponding to the frames it is permitted to send. Similarly, the receiver maintains a 'receiving window' corresponding to the set of frames it is permitted to accept. The window size is dependent on the retransmission policy and it may differ in values for the receiver's and the sender's window. The sequence numbers within the sender's window represent the frames sent but as yet not acknowledged.

iv. Addressing

Data-link layer provides layer-2 hardware addressing mechanism. Hardware address is assumed to be unique on the link. It is encoded into hardware at the time of manufacturing.

v. Synchronization

When data frames are sent on the link, both machines must be synchronized in order to transfer to take place.

vi. Multi-Access

When host on the shared link tries to transfer the data, it has a high probability of collision. Data-link layer provides mechanism such as CSMA/CD to equip capability of accessing a shared media among multiple Systems.