Business Data Communications of CISCO Systems

Business Data Communications (0506460)
Semester II, 2019/2020
Project Guidelines
1- Overview
The group project for this course is based around the Design of a simple ROBO/SOHO LAN network design. Groups will work together to solve two problems. While the Collaborative (group) work is recommended for creating the project, the following guidelines must be adhered to:
• The maximum number of members per group is four.
• Groups are self-selecting and must be organised by the 3rd week of the semester.
• Students not in a group by the 3rd week in the semester should request to be put in one.
• Once groups are specified, membership cannot be changed unless under extenuating circumstances.
• Collaborative work occurs when two or more students work together on course related tasks where a reasonable amount of work is completed jointly.
• When students do not declare that their work resulted from a collaborative effort, and a high degree of
• commonality exists between different students’ work, then dishonesty practice guidelines (see course outline) will be consulted.
• Peer assessment will be employed to clarify contributions to joint work (if requested).
• Students will receive the same result for collaborative work unless peer assessment identities disparity. In these cases, individual results will be calculated.

Problem 1
The company’s offices are stationed on two floors and house 40 users. The LAN switches were made by various vendors. They are more than 5 years old and thus can’t guarantee a reliable network operation. The same goes for the firewall that can control network traffic only up to Layer 4.
The two wiring closets are interconnected by a multimode optical fibre. Cat5e category cabling is spanning the building. Every floor has a shared central colour printer and copier that is also used as a scanner. A file server running core services such as DNS and DHCP, the mail server and two web-based business applications servers are located in the first wiring closet. The first wiring closet is also the Internet connection endpoint.
Every user has a basic Internet access that should be secured by threat management applications. The network equipment being used, does not allow for remote access but the need for telecommuting is growing. The LAN should be made ready for the following year IP telephony deployment and a future use of IPv6. There isn’t any internal IT staff on site and because the business is operating on a low added value model, the costs of implementing and maintaining a LAN should also be as low as possible. The new network is to be designed for five years of continuous use.
Problem 2
The company’s offices are located in a single location that houses 20 users on two floors. The company does not have a consistent WLAN network policy and there are only two access points installed. The APs are the low-cost SOHO grade, that support IEEE 802.11b and IEEE 802.11g wireless standards. They are made by two different vendors, which results in more network management than necessary. The first one is located at the reception and the second one in the meeting room. They’re connected directly into the local area network, so there’s no real control over the wireless traffic access. The users connect to the APs using a pre-shared key and a WPA-PSK encryption. Recently, a new UTM firewall, that also has wireless AP controller functionality (CAPWAPP), was installed, but the current APs are not CAPWAPP compatible.
The company would like to have the ability to use the WLAN network on their entire rent space and to have a better control over the WLAN. The new WLAN network should have a single function – to allow an easy way to connect to the Internet. The WLAN should not have any access to the LAN network. The meeting room should have a ticketing system that makes WLAN access expire at the end of the business day.