MPPSC 2025 Prelims Paper-I · Question 48 of 100

Correct — D, Resilience. In networking, resilience is exactly this property: the network keeps delivering service, and recovers, when something breaks — a cut link, a failed router, corrupted or lost packets. It is engineered through redundancy (alternate paths, duplicate hardware), automatic failover and re-routing, error detection with retransmission, and backups. The ordinary meaning of the word is the memory hook: resilience is the ability to bounce back from disruption.

• (a)Routing — Routing is the selection of the path a packet takes from source to destination, done by routers using routing tables and protocols. Re-routing can be one mechanism that delivers resilience, but the word itself names path selection, not recovery from failure.
• (b)Bandwidth — Bandwidth is capacity — how much data a link can carry per unit time, measured in bits per second. A high-capacity link does not help at all once that link is broken.
• (c)Contention — Contention is the opposite kind of situation: two or more devices competing for the same shared channel (as on classic Ethernet, handled by CSMA/CD), which produces collisions and delay rather than recovery.

Network vocabulary splits into performance words and dependability words. Bandwidth, throughput and latency describe how well a network performs when everything is working. Resilience, fault tolerance and availability describe what happens when something fails. Resilience is bought with redundancy: more than one physical path between two points (a mesh or ring rather than a single line), standby devices that take over automatically, protocols that detect loss and retransmit (TCP), and off-site backups of data.

The trap is option (a). Students who know that a network survives a broken link by sending traffic another way reach for 'Routing', because re-routing is how the recovery actually happens. But the question asks for the name of the ability, not the mechanism that provides it. Read the stem literally — 'the ability … to recover' — and only 'Resilience' is a property; the other three are a process, a capacity measure and a problem.

• Resilience = the ability of a network to keep working and recover after faults such as link or node failure and data loss
• It is built from redundancy: multiple paths, failover devices, mesh topology, backups; TCP retransmits lost segments
• Bandwidth is capacity, measured in bits per second — a performance metric, not a reliability one
• Contention arises when devices share one channel; classic Ethernet's CSMA/CD manages the resulting collisions

• Choosing 'Routing' because re-routing is how resilience is delivered — the stem asks for the property, not the mechanism
• Mixing up 'contention' (competition for a shared medium) with 'congestion' (a network overloaded with traffic)

MPPSC's computer block asks one-line definitional questions from networking — 'X is known as…', 'which device is used to…', 'which is NOT a topology'. UPSC touches the same area only through cyber-security, data protection and internet infrastructure.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which network topology offers the highest fault tolerance because every node has more than one path to the others?

  • (a)Bus
  • (b)Star
  • (c)Ring
  • (d)Mesh

  Answer(d) Mesh — multiple independent paths mean a single broken link does not isolate any node.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In computer networking, bandwidth is normally measured in:

  • (a)Bits per second
  • (b)Bytes of storage
  • (c)Number of routers on the path
  • (d)Milliseconds

  Answer(a) Bits per second — bandwidth is the data-carrying capacity of a link; milliseconds measure latency, not bandwidth.