Question

A city engineer is tasked with studying vehicular traffic patterns throughout a large metropolitan area. He designs a number of small, remote devices that can be installed along streets throughout the city to sense and record the hundreds of cars that pass through each of the city's five busiest intersections during a 24-hour period. Every time a car trips the sensor in a device, it increments an internal, 5-bit counter that stores the number of cars that have passed through the intersection since the counter was last reset. Every 24 hours, each device transmits the 5-bit value stored in its counter back to a central server that collects the daily data from all of the devices throughout the city. After transmitting, the counter in each device is reset back to 0.Fortunately, the engineer's supervisor points out a flaw in the device's design and orders that the engineer modify the design specifications for his device before building and installing all of the sensors. Which of the following is the most likely design flaw in this scenario?

1. In order to measure the five busiest intersections, devices will need to be installed at all other intersections throughout the city as well.
2. The counter is not capable of counting hundreds of cars without exceeding the limit of the five bits of storage.T
3. The device should only transmit its counter value once per week to avoid overloading the network.
4. In addition to incrementing the counter, the device should also transmit its counter value after each car trips the sensor

Answer 1

The correct answer is "The counter is not capable of counting hundreds of cars without exceeding the limit of the five bits of storage"

Step-by-step explanation:

It is obvious the engineer did not envisage that the number of cars that will be collected in the daily data would not be so much into the hundreds and so uses a storage of 5-bit value. Hence it makes it impossible for the counter to count hundreds of car and save to the central saver since it sill definitely exceed the limit of the five bits of storage available to the central server.