Order # 13436

Running Head: WAN Network Design

WAN Network Design

WAN Network Design

Jeannette Pereyra

Capella University

Wan Network Diagram Featuring A Tiered Topology Over Three Branches;

Infrastructure

Considering that our organization has three offices worldwide, and that the offices are located in different continents, we need to come up with a WAN that will see to it that users in the three offices can communicate efficiently and that users in the same office can carry out tasks like printing of papers and performing different biometric authorization tasks with the support of our network. To ensure users can communicate through the three continents we will link the offices LANs using the internet. The introduction of the internet means that each office will require a modem to link it to the internet, a router to route data from the internet to a user and vice versa, wireless bridges to serve wireless network, a switch to connect the devices, and other components to aid users with daily tasks. All the three offices will have 48 port switches, this is to take into account the high numbers of users in our offices as each office serves more than 40 users per day. Most ports from the switch will be used to serve users that require very low latency while 4 ports will serve wireless network bridges placed in different wings to give some users wireless access to the network. To connect the three centers we will make use of the internet as it is cheaper that way than if we were to construct a network to span three continents (Zhang, 2018). Luckily for the internet connection all our offices have an access to high speed fibre optic and so we will only need three fibre optic capable modems to connect each center to the internet and thus to each other. After installing the modem we will need a high speed router to match the modems speed. Our WAN topology of choice will be the tiered topology to whereby our LANs will utilize a star topology.

Ip addressing

Since we will be connecting the three centres over the Internet, we will need to add an extra layer of security to ensure our data is protected from being accessed by unauthorized persons over the internet. To achieve this we will have to setup VPN tunneling between our centers for the specific information that we don’t want accessed on the public internet.

We will rely on a manual role based IP address assignment for all clients on our networks. The main advantage of using a manual IP assignment strategy is to ensure that no one joins the network without the knowledge of the administrator and in that sense we can add an extra layer of security on our network. Moreover, using a role based IP assignment strategy will help to ensure that we can create network policies for different users and effect them instantly(Dupont, Srinivasan & Andrus, 2016).

Some other topology standards that we could consider would be the star topology or the mesh topology. The main challenge with these two topologies would be that it would be very costly to create such a network over three continents as we would have to rely on our own physical infrastructure to complete the network. Considering the physical and skill cost of laying down the infrastructure it is wise to just lay out LANs in each centre and connect the centers using internet and a tiered topology (Ozkan-Canbolat, & Beraha, 2016). As for the Ip addressing we would choose to use an automatic Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol DHCP but the main challenge with such an approach is that it would assign users Ip addresses dynamically and randomly which would not favor us if we decided to create policies to monitor and regulate network usage by clients with different roles. For the reason of easy policing it is better to have network administrators assign IP addresses in terms of roles as it also makes it harder for unauthorized personnel to connect (Dupont, Srinivasan & Andrus, 2016).

References

Dupont, E. P., Srinivasan, S., & Andrus, F. D. (2016). U.S. Patent No. 9,369,299. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Ozkan-Canbolat, E., & Beraha, A. (2016). A configurational approach to network topology design for product innovation. Journal of Business Research, 69(11), 5216-5221.

Zhang, W. (2018). U.S. Patent Application No. 15/435,528.