Program
Designing the WAN for Delaware Office
The introduction of e-business in the IT industry has brought about the need for interoperability. As such, this there is also the need for a major catalyst by adopting more rapid standards across the industry to support e-commerce. Wide Area Network (WAN) involves exchanging information across wide geographic areas. It is employed, for instance, when we have a central office serving branches located in different locations. In this case, we are designing a WAN where the hosts located in Delaware have to communicate with branch hosts at Nevada office and California office. We need to have the highest amount of availability when connecting the sites and, star topology is the most appropriate in this case.
Justification (Why we chose this topology)
It is easy to add new nodes to this kind of topology without affecting the rest of the network. You can as well remove components easily. This comes in handy because we still have other hosts in the upcoming branches to be added to this network.
This kind of topology provides centralized management hence network monitoring can be done with ease. Faults and alarms at various hosts can be detected from a central monitoring center.
Since we have a large number of hosts in this network, we need this type of topology so that a failure of one node wouldn’t affect the rest. In addition, troubleshooting the fault node can be done with ease. We can troubleshoot a link failure at a given branch without interfering with the entire network setup.
Transmission of signals in this kind of topology is less complicated than other types of topologies because the signals only reach the intended host. The signals don’t have to travel through several nodes before reaching the destination. Link performance in this kind of topology is excellent. It enhances the security of the transmitted information and also ensures that it is delivered to the intended person/host.
In this network setup, the central management center will be at Delaware headquarter. That is the central hub’s location where all nodes including hosts from the upcoming branches interconnect. As such, this justifies the choice of the star topology because all the hosts will radiate from the central hub. The topology is also convenient when the distance between the hosts is large, just like in our case where we have branches located at a distance from the central office.
Frame Relay - Underlying WAN Technology
The Frame relay is a packet-switching protocol for connecting devices on a WAN. It supports data transfer rates at T-1 (1.544Mbs) and T-3 (45Mbs) speeds, and this proves very efficient in our case. Such is because of the large number of hosts are involved here. Besides, this kind of WAN technology is inexpensive to implement. Additionally, in this kind of WAN technology, transmission follows a known path, and there is no need for the transmitting devices to figure which route is best for use at a given time.
This type of technology has also been adopted due to its reliability and minimal error rates in the transmitted signal. The devices working on the frame relay network do not have to repackage and reassemble frames during transmission. This type of technology provides end-to-end service over a known digital communication route. It relies heavily on the reliability afforded by the digital technology (Woodcock, 2016).
References
Woodcock, J. (2016). Wan Technologies. Retrieved from technet.microsoft.com: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb962087.aspx
Appendix I
Basic WAN topology 1
