ELEC3500 Telecommunication Networks : About Information Architecture

Introduction:

A strong network infrastructure is the main requirements of the business owners. This is done by creating a central office with core features to support the business. However, with increasing demands and success it becomes necessary to create secondary offices as well. This creates a need to maintain the network infrastructure of the associated offices along with the required tools needed.  This report includes the network services like emails, WWW or other core services that are used for processing of business applications. Furthermore, this report depicts the data processing tools like the cloud storage or the P2P solutions to be integrated in this report.

Discussion:

This section discusses about the main structural requirements to be addressed by the company.

Network infrastructure:

The company Cookie Co. needs the removal of their existing information architecture. This creates a need to create a new solution which will be used to facilitate connectivity across the main offices and the branch offices as well.  

Network convergence:

The network solution includes the installation of a new architecture that will have an expansion feature to support future business requirements. Furthermore, the business solution also includes the presence of architecture requirements to address the branch office connection in an efficient and secured way.

The main office is supposed to include the core infrastructural needs to address the business requirements. Six 2U rack server storage will be utilized in the main office. This is done so that business expansion is achieved. The servers will be directly connected to a switch with 1x8 ports or 1x24 port connections. The switch will form the connecting link between the various devices.

The switch will be connected to a router. The router port will be connected in one of the switch ports and a firewall technique will be installed between the router and the switch. This is done to get secure access to the internet (Silander and Myllymaki 2012).  Another one of the ports will be utilized for complying with the IEEE 802.11n standard. This will be done to get wireless access. The wireless access will be used to connect laptops to the network. This port will also be guided through a firewall setting.

Another port of the switch will be used to connect to the LAN connections of the office. This LAN connection will then be used to connect various devices on the same network of the office. This will lead to a secure and efficient access to the internet. Moreover, the company Cookie Co. will also setup a print server that will be used to connect printing and fax machines.  

Fig: Network of Cookie Co.

(Source: Created by the author)

LAN and cabling types:

LAN connections are required for connecting the various devices in the office infrastructure of Cookie Co. This requires the presence of Ethernet cables for facilitating LAN connectivity. Moreover, the adapters for the Ethernet cables can be used for connection in existing wirings without the need for any new wiring requirements (Gupta 2016). This is another way to reduce the cost of the installation which increases the efficiency of operations.

The types of cable used with the Ethernet LAN types include the patch cables. This facilitates connection of the various devices to a socket.

WAN connection:

The WAN connectivity is used to make a connection among the main and the branch office of Cookie Co. This is done by the installation of a data service unit or by the introduction of a virtual private network (VPN). The data service unit is then used to establish a connection with the internet service provider of the concerned area by connecting it to the equipments of the internet service providers (Zhang et al. 2012). In addition, WAN connectivity can also be facilitated by utilizing the VPN technology. The main operations include the setting up of a router at both the main and the branch locations. This process includes setting up of a firewall setting in this section so that efficient and secured connection is established.

The VPN connections can also be used to setup WAN connection by installing an application specific hardware and software. This utilizes the use of a public network for getting access to the internet. Although, this solution is economical, their use can have security implications in the company.

Transmission media and connecting device:

The transmission guides to be used in this case is the use of optical fibers. The main benefits of this include the increase in efficiency by reducing the presence of interference in the associated signals (Ziemann et al. 2013). Moreover, the transmission property utilized is the total internal reflection which is used to reduce the attenuation level in the transmitted signals. This is the main reason which leads to the increase in efficiency of operations in the business of Cookie Co.

The devices to be used with the transmission media are repeaters. These are required to increase the signal strength after a signal has travelled a certain distance.

IP and DNS management:

The IP and DNS management is basically done by utilizing certain network monitoring tools (Aiello, Merlo and Papaleo 2012). These tools can be used to search for static IPs in the system and reference them for ensuring a better connection.

DNS management is done by searching for the subnet mask, host name, lookups and network status for a specified IP.  

Network services:

Network service utilizes the network layer of a specified model. The various services to be used are the file sharing service, print server, email and VoIP.

File sharing:

This process is used for sending or receiving electronic media or documents. The common methods of file sharing are the WWW (World Wide Web) and P2P networks (peer-to-peer).

The per-to-peer protocol includes the use of directory servers. The setup of such connection can be done by using Ethernet cables and routers (Ricci and Carlini 2012). Moreever, the operating system also plays an important role in deciding whether to use Home goup connection or work group connections.

The World Wide Web utilizes the informative space that exists in the digital world. This is mainly done by using URLs. The domain of the company is to be established which can be done by directly purchasing it from providers.

Email:

Email is a technology to send electronic mails between senders and receivers. The company concerned needs to make their very own business email id which can be used to address their business requirements.  The most commercial method of using a company email id is the utilization of Gmail.

Print server:

A print server is used to establish a network connection which can be used to remotely access a printer or fax machine. This removes the need of wired connections of printers to each of the computers connected in the network of Cookie Co. (Cheshire and Krochmal 2013). An Ethernet cable is used to make connections to the printer which is then connected to the office network.

VoIP (Voice over IP):

This technology is done by utilizing a network connection and connecting voice calls from various devices. The main benefits of this connectivity are the increase in quality of voice calls. This increases the main business effectiveness and addresses the main concerns of the business of Cookie Co. (Ricci and Carlini 2012). The process of VoIP consists of signaling, setting up of a channel, analog to digital conversion and encoding or decoding to achieve them.

Data processing facilities:

Data Storage:

Data storage is done by a company to store their data in another infrastructure. This is done by remote or physical access to the devices. The common processes included in this section are the data center, SAN network, Cloud and distributed database.

This technology incorporates the storage processes of a business by connecting over a network. However, the disadvantage of this connection is that these devices cannot be used to connect to the local area network. The main concept of data storage is done by using disk arrays.

The cloud infrastructure is another process which can lead to effective business processes of the system (Zissis and Lekkas 2012).  The main advantage to this technology is the reduction of the physical structures and the installation of virtual servers.

Data Processing:

The data processing section uses the client-server as well as the peer-to-peer technology. The client server model is done between a service requester and a service provider. However, the peer-to-peer method is used to establish connection among various devices where each one of them behaves as the client and server (Ricci and Carlini 2012). The use of a routers and Ethernet cables is facilitated in the P2P protocol.

Conclusion:

Thus, it can be concluded that the use of a successful network infrastructure is to be done by carefully analyzing the contents of this report. This is done by creating a successful network infrastructure among the various office locations of Cookie Co. so that the data and files can be shared and accessed with each other without any delay in operations. The data storage to be used is the cloud solutions and the data processing to be used is the peer-to-peer connections.

References:

Aiello, M., Merlo, A. and Papaleo, G., 2012. Performance assessment and analysis of DNS tunneling tools. Logic Journal of IGPL, 21(4), pp.592-602.

Chen, S.C. and Wong, K.L., 2012. Low?profile, small?size, wireless wide area network handset antenna close integration with surrounding ground plane. Microwave and Optical Technology Letters, 54(3), pp.623-629.

Cheshire, S. and Krochmal, M., 2013. DNS-based service discovery (No. RFC 6763).

Gupta, S., 2016. A Comparative Analysis of Wired and Wireless Network Architecture. International Journal of Emerging Trends in Research, 1(1), pp.05-11.

Lin, M., Chen, Q. and Yan, S., 2013. Network in network. arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.4400.

Ricci, L. and Carlini, E., 2012, July. Distributed virtual environments: From client server to cloud and p2p architectures. In High Performance Computing and Simulation (HPCS), 2012 International Conference on (pp. 8-17). IEEE.

Silander, T. and Myllymaki, P., 2012. A simple approach for finding the globally optimal Bayesian network structure. arXiv preprint arXiv:1206.6875.

Sinnreich, H. and Johnston, A.B., 2012. Internet communications using SIP: Delivering VoIP and multimedia services with Session Initiation Protocol (Vol. 27). John Wiley & Sons.

Zetterberg, P. and Moghadam, N.N., 2012, April. An experimental investigation of SIMO, MIMO, interference-alignment (IA) and coordinated multi-point (CoMP). In Systems, Signals and Image Processing (IWSSIP), 2012 19th International Conference on (pp. 211-216). IEEE.

Zhang, Y., Ansari, N., Wu, M. and Yu, H., 2012. On wide area network optimization. IEEE Communications surveys & tutorials, 14(4), pp.1090-1113.

Ziemann, O., Krauser, J., Zamzow, P.E. and Daum, W., 2013. POF-polymer optical fibers for data communication. Springer Science & Business Media.

Zissis, D. and Lekkas, D., 2012. Addressing cloud computing security issues. Future Generation computer systems, 28(3), pp.583-592.