The Letran Graduate School LAN

The Rector of the Colegio de San Juan De Letran is considering that a local area network be set up
at the Graduate School Building which houses also the Graduate School Library, Office of the
Chancellor and several audio-visual and conference rooms as well as air-conditioned lecture rooms
at the second floor.
The President has approved the purchase of LAN hardware and software, the specific details of
which shall be recommended by you, the Network Designer/ Administrator. All officers (i.e.,
chancellor, deans, college secretaries, and head librarian) shall each be provided a desktop PC,
notebook computer and printer. The offices shall each be provided a server, printer and fax as well
as a PC for each of their staff. The Conference Room and the Graduate School Library shall have 10
PC units and 2 printers each.
The LAN would handle student database management system, automated teacher/ classroom
assignment system, and graduate school staff attendance monitoring system as well as web-based
applications such as e-mail system, the Letran Graduate School Portal, on-line enrolment system
and on-line grade reporting system. Aside from these centralized systems, each graduate school
would also have its own relevant applications.
The Rector has secured an ADB grant of USD 3 Million for this project. Instruction:
Answer the following cases and apply the Knowledge applicable to IT Poject & Network
strategies in each case.

CASE 1

A. What are the pros and cons of installing such a LAN? Would you recommend that the Rector
proceed with his plan? Why?

B. As the LAN designer, the Rector has asked you to conduct a network needs analysis to determine
the suitability of the proposed LAN to the various graduate schools’ requirements.

Wireless local area networks have unique advantages in many places.

Firstly,
wireless local area networks are more flexible and mobile than the wired
ones
and they will not be limited by cables. Users may have access to or receive
information at any network coverages in real time. Secondly, WLANs have
good
scalability. Users can add more APs to effectively expand the network so as
to
meet the needs of specific applications and installations. Thirdly, WLANs no
longer require a lot of wires and cables, which will reduce the workload of
network
cabling. Finally, it is easier to set up a WLAN than a wired one and it cannot
be easily affected by the natural environment or disasters.
With LANs, work and study efficiency is improved, but it also brings some
problems.
Wired local area networks couldn’t work without the cable, which
means that we couldn’t change the structure of networks casually according
to
actual situations. Therefore, we cannot implement mobile office and studies.

Therefore, the current local area network couldn’t meet users’ demands to
certain extent. In order to make users access data at any place and at any
time,
networks should develop from being wired and fixed to being wireless and
mobile.
Compared with local area networks, wireless local area networks offer
advantages
at different places. One of the advantage of a wireless local area network
is that if there is coverage of WLAN, users can move anywhere they want
with their devices and transmit data at the same time. Other advantages
include
easy installation, effective expansion, flexibility and cost savings.

Wireless LAN Transmission Media

There are three main transmission media for WLANs. The first one is
microwave
and the range of frequencies is 1GHz to 40GHz. Microwave is not a true
sense
of the LAN technology, it is used to interconnect the buildings’ local area
network.
It is suitable for point-to-point transmission and also satellite
communications.
The second media is radio and the range of frequencies is 3KHz to 300GHz.
This transmission media is currently widely used, because the radio wave
has
wide coverage. It is suitable for all the applications. The difference between
broadcast radio and microwave is that the radio didn’t require antennas.
And,
the radio’s former is omnidirectional and the microwave’s former is
directional.
The third one is infrared. The infrared uses transmitter and receiver to
modulate
non-coherent infrared light. The difference between infrared and microwave
transmission is that infrared will not penetrate walls. And, there is no
frequency
allocation problem for the infrared, because it doesn’t required license.
(Vittorio
2008.)
2.5 Technical Standards of Wireless Local Area Network
Users have many choices when they are looking for network gear. Many
products
conform to the 802.11 series wireless standards, also known as Wi-Fi
technologies.
There are also various other wireless technologies, such as Bluetooth,
HomeRF and HiperLAN. They are designed for specific networking
applications

1. What are the various aspects/ factors that must be

considered in the network needs analysis? Explain.

Cost: Cost is one of the most common limiting factors when producing any design; however, for
the purpose of the CCDE practical exam, cost should be considered as a design constraint only
if it is mentioned in the scenario as a factor to be considered or a tiebreaker between two
analogous solutions.
■ Time: Time can also be a critical constraint when selecting a technology or architecture over
another if there is a time frame to complete the project, for example.
■ Location: Location is one of the tricky types of constraints because it can introduce
limitations that indirectly affect the design. For instance, a remote site may be located in an
area where no fiber infrastructure is available and the only available type of connectivity is over
wireless. From a high-level architectural point of view, this might not be a serious issue. From a
performance point of view, however, this might lead to a reduced link speed, which will affect
some sensitive applications used by that site.
■ Infrastructure equipment: A good example here is that of legacy network devices. If a
business has no plan to replace these devices, this can introduce limitations to the design,
especially if new features or protocols not supported by these legacy platforms are required to
optimize the design.
■ Staff expertise: Sometimes network designers might propose the best design with the latest
technologies in the market, which can help reduce the business’s total cost of ownership (TCO)
(for example, in the case of virtualization in the data center and the consolidation of data and
Fibre Channel [FC] storage over one infrastructure Fibre Channel over Ethernet [FCoE]). This
can be an issue, however, if the staff of this company has no expertise in these technologies
used to operate and maintain the network. In this case, you have two possible options (with
some limitations applying to each, as well):
■ Train the staff on these new technologies: This will be associated with a risk, because as a
result of the staff’s lack of experience, they may take a longer time to fix any issue that might
occur, and at the same time, data center downtime can cost the business a large amount of
money.
■ Hire staff with experience in these technologies: Normally, people with this level of expertise
are expensive. Consequently, the increased operational cost might not justify the reduced TCO.
CCDE study Guide_Ch01_p003-030v3.0.3.indd 12 15/09/15 3:25 pm Crafting the Design
Requirements 13 Note In some situations, if the proposed solution and technologies will save
the business a significant amount of money, you can justify the cost of hiring new staff.

2. Prepare a suitable network needs analysis plan.

In this project, the basic goal is using wireless network technology to expand
teaching area network and make it possible for students connect to the network
at anytime and anywhere. In the real environment, it’s impossible to expand
signals to every corner by using wired networks, that’s one of the reason
why we need WLAN.
The goals of campus WLAN should focus on efficiency, stability and safety. And,
easy to install, maintain and manage. The WLAN should have a better performance
and low cost at the same time. It should provide teachers a flexible
teaching platform and students an effective study environment. The establishment
of campus WLAN mainly consider about the following aspects of requirements.
The first is the teacher's teaching requirements. WLAN will make full use
of the multimedia resources, so the teachers can use the WLAN at any time to
obtain the relevant teaching resources and course information, then all the valuable
information will pass to the students clearly and accurately. The second
18
is the student's learning requirements. Students can access information resources,
submit assignments or conduct group activities in a WLAN environment.
The third is the number of ports requirements. There are many of the
existing network terminal equipment in campus. And, there are large demand
of network ports in library or classroom environment. The WLAN will meet the
needs of information points. The fourth is the construction wiring requirements.
The WLAN allows smooth communication between various buildings in campus.
The wireless networks can coverage the signals to the places where there are
difficult to arrangement of wires.
I will design WLAN for five different buildings and one outdoor area. The buildings
include the main building, complex building, dormitory, cafeteria and the
laboratory building, as shown in Figure 12.
Figure 12. The plan of the campus
There are six floors in the main building,
consisting of classrooms and offices.
And, there are eleven floors in the complex
building, consisting of the library
and activity rooms. What’s more, there are
six floors in the dormitory, two floors
in the cafeteria and eight floors in the
laboratory building.
C. The President has expressed his preference for a wireless LAN.
Design an appropriate LAN using the standard design for network.

The campus is a special place for the students to learn something new and
campus network has become an important platform to gain deeper
knowledge.
Due to this, the construction of the network in the campus environment has
become an important necessity. The number of students who uses their own
device is increasing rapidly, this increase the stress on the network. Only
using
the devices available on the campus is not enough and it cannot meet the
requirement
of the students. Many universities have switched to wireless network,
which is easy to access and cost efficient. The advantages of the wireless
network
cannot be matched by the wired network.
In this project, I will design a WLAN for my high school. The actual situations
of
the campus should be considered before designing the WLAN. This school
has
one main building, one student dormitory, one complex building, one gym
and
one laboratory building. About 2,000 students are studying and 250 teachers
are working there.

In this part I planned a basic topology for the WLAN, as shown in Figure 13.
 In this figure, the core of the campus network is the network center. The
router
is connected to the external network and firewall. There are different kinds
of
servers connect to the router. I used one core switch connected to the wired
network and the wireless controller connected to the core switch. Then I
have
several PoE switches connected to the core switch and access point connect
to the PoE switches. PoE refers to Power over Ethernet and it is a technology
that lets network cables carry electrical power. It means that only one cable
is
enough for the PoE switch to provide network and power connection at the
same time. Then the APs will spread out the wireless signals so that all the
clients in the coverage area are able to access the WLAN

Channel Management
I introduced channels in the theory part and here I will elaborate which
channel
I will use for each building by using the HiveManager NG tool. And, I will also
explain why I select that channel. Here I planned channels for each building.
For the main building, each floor uses 4 APs and all the APs work on the
2.4GHz
bandwidth, so I used the channels 1, 6 and 11. As shown in Figure 14,
channels
will not overlap each other. What’s more, I used different permutations to
manage
the APs for each floor. It means that I used different channels for the same
locations of the neighboring floors. I will also use this method for other

buildings.

Figure 14. Channel management for the main building

For the laboratory building, each floor uses 2 APs and all the APs work on the
2.4GHz bandwidth, so I selected channel 1 and channel 6. As shown in
Figure
15, red and green colors show that the channels will not overlapping each
other.

Channel Management for Laboratory Building

For the cafeteria, one AP is required for each floor and I used different
channels
in different floors. I used channel 1 for the first floor, as shown in Figure 16
and
I use channel 6 for the second floor. So the channels will not overlapping
each
other.

Figure 16. Channel Management for Cafeteria

D. Prepare cost estimates based on your design.

E. Prepare a suitable LAN implementation plan.

CASE 2
A. The President/Rector wants you to design an appropriate LAN.
What LAN technologies are locally available? Which would you
recommend? Why?

B. Design an appropriate LAN based on the needs of your client.

C. Prepare detailed cost estimates based on your design.

D. Prepare a suitable LAN implementation plan.

E. You are currently the network designer/ administrator for the

entire Letran. Realizing that your hands are already full, the
President/Rector wants you to organize a separate team to handle
the Graduate School LAN.

1. Recommend a relevant organizational structure.

2. Prepare the job specifications and descriptions for each position.
3. Prepare a relevant personnel development plan for those who will
be hired.