Corporate Communication Systems Management Assignment Spring 2022

Assignment Guidance

The learning outcomes assessed in this assignment are as follows:

•   It is the student’s responsibility to familiarise themselves with the Academic Dishonesty and Plagiarism policy contained in the Programme Handbook.

•   Any assignment submitted after the submission deadline, without prior approval, will be given 0% and the student will be referred.

•   The late assignment submission may be marked as a referral attempt, but only a maximum mark of 40% can be awarded for that particular assessment.

•   If a student requests an extension to the official submission date this must be done in writing to the Course Director at least five full UK working days before the official submission date. This request must be accompanied by supporting evidence.

•   This assignment is worth 40% of the overall final mark for the module.

•   Students should write no more than 1600 words (+/- 10%) for this assignment. Additional words may not be marked.

•   Students are encouraged to read widely in preparing for the assignment, making reference to articles in academic journals and other relevant sources.

•   All references should be cited in text and included in a reference section at the end of the report using the Harvard Referencing Scheme.

•   The Statement and Confirmation of Own Work must be completed and submitted with the assignment.

•   This assignment must be submitted by the due date and time as given on the front of this assignment.

•   Please refer to the Assessment Criteria contained in the Programme Handbook which shows how the level of marking relates to your standard of work.

Submission Requirements

You must  read and  understand  NCC  Education’s  policy on  ‘Academic  Dishonesty  and Plagiarism’ . You must complete the attached form ‘Statement and Confirmation of Own Work’ and attach your completed form to your assignment.

Scenario

A small business enterprise, named “Got 2 Get”, located in a city has two offices – a

corporate office (termed as location 1 or L1) that houses the Corporate team and the

Sales and Marketing team and an Operations office (termed as location 2 or L2) that

houses the other teams including the IT team. The two offices L1 and L2 are connected via a point-to-point leased line. The Internet access is via a router at L2.

At L1, the network has two internal segments one each for the corporate and Sales &

Marketing teams. At L2, there are four internal segments, one each for three teams

including the IT team and one firewalled exclusive segment for hosting the organisation’s web server.

There are now plans to open a third office within the same city at a different location, L3, to expand to provide online sales and customer support. L3 will connect to L2 via a leased

link. L3 will have an internal network containing three segments, one each for the online

sales team, customer support team, and the web & database servers for online sales.  The network segment for online sales will be firewalled. L3 will have a link to the Internet for online sales.

Following setting up L3, the business plans to acquire a warehouse location L4, physically adjoining L3 for inventory and stocks, which are now handled by a third-party company. It  is planned that L4 will have a video surveillance network that is connected via the network and monitored by a team in L3. The video logging of the surveillance feed is done on servers at location L2.

You are a network design consultant who is expected to advise them on the design

aspects of the network. You should review and advise on the following aspects of the design so that their business requirements are met. Their business requirements are:

•   24x7 online business access and availability

•   24x7 customer service access

•   24x7 video surveillance, notifications, and alarms for L4

The technical aspects to consider for design decisions are:

•    Bandwidth requirement estimates for the leased connections between L2 & L1 and L2 & L3

•    Each team is in a separate network segment of the internal network at their location

•   Secure the Internal network from external traffic

•    Redundant network resources (devices & links) to ensure 24x7 availability

•    Interconnection between L3 and L4

•   Service Level Agreements (SLA) with Internet providers

The details of the individual team sizes at each location is listed below. Each member of a team has a computing device that is used to access the organisation’s network. The members of the warehouse team will be provided with tablets to enable them to be mobile.

Table 1: Number of hosts in each team and location

You are expected to provide a report style document whose content must answer the specific questions mentioned as tasks below.

Guidelines for responding to the tasks:

•    Understand the components, layout and needs of the business

•   Make appropriate assumptions where necessary and state them clearly

•   Make use of schematics, diagrams, figures to illustrate your ideas and/or topology

•   Present information comprehensively using tables

•   Avoid giving details of technologies and protocols, unless specifically required by the task

Assignment

General                                                                                                (up to 20 marks)

Your submission will be evaluated for these general tasks – Research (sources of information), references (referencing format and in-text citations), legibility of the labelling in the schematics, the standard of report writing (language, continuity, comprehensiveness), its structure (sections, subsections, table of contents, reference list) and presentation (formatting, captions, and illustrations)

Task 1                                                                                                   (up to 20 marks)

a)  Illustrate the connectivity between the locations L2 and L1, L2 and L3, L3 and L4 using a schematic. You need to illustrate only the wide-area connectivity and not the LAN segments.

b)  List the configuration of the devices you would use for these interconnections.  Recall that L2 and L3 have links to the Internet. The configuration detail should mention the type of ports and the number of ports required.

c)  Now, suggest a vendor router and model that fits the requirements. Mention the

configuration, features, quantity and cost of each model required. Use a table to represent this information. Column headings should read “Vendor Name”, “Model”,   “Configuration” (#ports, port type, interface speed, router forwarding rate, any other  feature), “Quantity”, “Cost” . Along with the cost, mention the source you got the cost from. Give a brief justification of your choice of the model for L3.

Task 2                                                                                                   (up to 20 marks)

Illustrate the local network segments of the organisation , at each location

a)  Illustrate the network segment at location L1 . How are the two teams segmented on to different network segments? Make a list of equipment you propose to be used, similar to Task 1 c).

b)  Illustrate the network at L2 and L3 showing their interconnection, network segments and the Internet connection. How are the segments structured/interconnected securely?

c)  Make a list of equipment required for L2 and L3 locations using a table structure as mentioned in Task 1 c)

Task 3                                                                                                   (up to 25 marks)

The IP addressing of the network uses Class C private addresses for the network segments of L1, L2, and L3. L1 and L2 share one class C address. The internal network interfaces of the routers at L3 and L4 when commissioned will share another class C address.

a)  List the IP addresses and their subnets for each location and for the router

interfaces. Use a table to list the IP subnets, the associated subnet mask (or CIDR) and the useable address range for each subnet. The columns of the table must be titled “Class C IP address”, “Location”, “IP subnet with mask/CIDR”, “ IP address range (x.x.x.y to x.x.x.z)”, “Number of hosts addresses in the range” . IP subnets that are not utilised must be listed and marked as “Unused” in the location column.

b)  In the subnets you created, what is the percentage utilisation of the address space?  Calculate this using the equation (% utilisation = (host addresses used in the subnet / host addresses in the subnet) * 100).

c)  If the utilisation of address space is less than 50% per subnet, it implies that the

subnet sizes can be reduced. There is a total of 55 hosts (including L4) and the router interfaces. Use a single Class C address and provide subnets for all network segments and calculate the address utilisation percentage.  Use the table format mentioned in (3a).

Task 4                                                                                                   (up to 15 marks)

a)  L4 is connected to L3 as a firewalled network segment. There is a total of 30 IP

video cameras that are installed at the warehouse. All these will be sending concurrent live video feeds to a server in L2 via the L3 to L2 WAN link. Choose an appropriate video camera with a wired Ethernet interface and calculate the maximum video bandwidth required. What should be the bandwidth of the L3 to L2 WAN link?

b)  What would your choice of the routing protocol on the WAN links (L1 to L2, L2 to L3) be? Briefly explain your choice.

c)  There are two links to the Internet – one from L2 and one from L3. If these two links were to be configured as redundant Internet links (for high availability), would you approve it? Would you suggest any changes? If yes, explain why.

Total marks for the assignment = 100 marks.

Your report should be 1600 words (+/- 10%) plus diagrams.