Network Design — Lecture Collection

Course outline and requirements for the historical Network Analysis and Design class. Use this document to orient your study of the chapter presentations.

Introduction to top-down network design, requirements analysis, OSI layers, organizational factors, and a university network case study. Introduces the relationship between business context and technical decisions.

Publisher page for the course textbook, with book details and related resources. The link uses the current destination of the historical Cisco Press address.

Identify business needs, project scope, organizational constraints, and requirements that guide a top-down network design. Establishes why a network is needed before choosing its technologies and devices.

Evaluate scalability, availability, performance, security, manageability, usability, adaptability, affordability, and their tradeoffs. Provides a framework for discussing requirements with customers and balancing competing goals.

Map existing devices, segments, cabling, and environmental constraints to assess realistic design improvements. Uses the current environment as the starting point for realistic improvements and expansion.

Identify user communities, data stores, traffic sources and destinations, flow patterns, and performance requirements. Connects application behavior and user needs with capacity planning and design choices.

Compare flat, mesh, and hierarchical networks, including the core, distribution, and access layers. Shows how structural choices influence scalability, traffic paths, and network organization.

Develop structured addressing and naming policies, allow room for growth, and organize network and subnet assignments. Explains how consistent policies make a growing network easier to operate and document.

Choose protocols for the logical network design and evaluate how bridging, switching, and routing support design goals. Links protocol selection with the functional requirements of the logical network design.

Identify assets and risks, assess security tradeoffs, and plan network protection, monitoring, and management. Combines protective measures with the operational processes needed to maintain the network.

Choose campus LAN technologies, devices, and cabling, with attention to availability, scalability, and physical layout. Connects physical design choices with building layout, existing infrastructure, and expected service life.

Evaluate WAN and remote-access technologies, protocols, routers, and switches against business and technical requirements. Relates device and service selection to bandwidth, quality of service, topology, and remote users.

Use industry test results, prototype networks, modeling, and performance measurements to validate the proposed design. Shows how testing can uncover weaknesses before a full deployment.

Improve bandwidth use and quality of service, including IP multicast for multimedia and delay-sensitive applications. Addresses the performance needs of multimedia and other bandwidth-intensive or delay-sensitive applications.

Prepare proposals and design documents covering requirements, logical and physical design, testing, implementation, and success measures. Explains how documentation supports review, implementation, measurement, and future changes.

LAN hardware and software, connectivity, client/server analysis and design, and logical and physical architectures. This is the subject of the presentation stored as TopDownDes.ppt.

Wireless LAN applications, technologies, IEEE 802.11 standards and architecture, and Wi-Fi security. Discusses extending wired networks and connecting sites through wireless links.

IPv6 addressing and headers, hierarchical routing, network infrastructure requirements, and migration from IPv4. Treat platform and deployment details as historical examples from the presentation period.