This is our solution for the school district-wide WAN. After carefully considering the needs of the school district, the requirements given to us, and doing our own independent research, we believe this is the best networking solution for our school and school district. In this report, we touch on our WAN design, the equipment required, protocols and encapsulations used, and reasoning behind our decisions. We have also included a number of diagrams, full router configurations, hardware price estimates and address tables for all connected routers. WAN Design Our WAN design has three routers making up the core. The three routers are located at the three distribution points for the school district – the District Office, the Service Center and Shaw Butte Elementary. These three routers are connected in a triangle pattern – each router connected to the other two via a Frame Relay setup. They are connected with a dedicated T3 connection, each router having a secondary, unused T3 connection. This second connection is in place for redundancy (protection in case the first line fails), and for use in future expansion of the WAN. The District Office is connected to the Internet through Frame Relay. All schools in the district will connect to the Internet via this connection. From each distribution point, there is another T3 Frame Relay connection to an ISP. This connection then extends to the schools that are connected through by way of a T1 connection to each school, also doubled for redundancy and expandability. Each distribution point also uses ISDN to connect to a remote node – a community school that does not need a constant connection to the rest of the school district’s network. The performance of the WAN is improved by this layout design because it splits the WAN into many broadcast domains, reducing collisions and broadcast traffic as well as improving the speed of routing updates between the routers. The traffic within the point-to-point core routers will be limited to just information being passed between those three routers due to the connection with the ISP. In the distribution layer, the updates will be a little slower and the network will be a little busier because it is a multi-point connection and has to contend with more traffic – broadcast and otherwise.
To implement a district-wide WAN, we would need the following equipment:
The benefits of our design include the high speed between core routers, and the redundancy of each connection, both between the core routers and between the core and distribution layers. Our design is also relatively inexpensive to implement and maintain when you consider the magnitude of the project. The implementation of PPP adds to the security of the network, especially if PAP or CHAP is enabled, and helps ensure network stability. ISDN helps keep the remote node in the networks at a reduced cost since we do not have to pay for constant connectivity. The
point-to-point Frame Relay helps reduce broadcast traffic, thus reducing
the amount of time spent on the network, and the overall cost of connection.
This helps keep the amount of traffic down and ensures better stability
on the network. |
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