Reference no: EM133697528

IT Networking and Communication

Assessment: Case Study

Introduction
This is a Group assessment comprised of 5 Students. All group members must have to present their part in the demonstration/presentation.

Part A (Detailed Design): In this group assignment, you will assess the given case study to design a multi-level subnetting and provide a subnetted IP design plan. You must create a network topology using a network simulator (Cisco Packet Tracer) with the necessary labels and write a report on the design rationale. Each group must submit a report with the IP design plan, network topology screenshot and network design rationales.

Part B (Detailed Topology, Configuration and Demonstration): Using the network simulator (Cisco Packet Tracer), your group should configure the network designed for Part A. Each group must submit a report containing configuration commands and their descriptions and present the network demonstration.

Task
Mr. Sam, the IT director at Sydney Hospital, manages the network. Mr. Sam has requested your help proposing a network solution that meets the hospital's requirements. The hospital is growing, and the management has approved funds for network improvements.

The medical staff would like to be able to access medical systems using laptops from any of the patient rooms. Doctors and nurses should be able to access patient medical records, x-rays, prescriptions, and recent patient information. Mr Sam purchased new servers and placed them in the data centre. The wireless LAN (WLAN) has approximately 50 clients, with about 50 more due in six months. The servers must have high availability. Furthermore, an IP Telephony solution will be deployed, and IP addresses should be allocated for the 50 IP phones per floor.

Patient rooms are on floors 6 through 10 of the hospital building. Doctors should be able to roam and access the network from any floor. A wireless radio-frequency (RF) survey report mentions that three access points placed in the main hallways on each floor can provide full wireless coverage.

The current network has ten segments, with LAN switches and fast Ethernet ports that reach a single router that also serves the WAN. Only a single link is used from the floors to the core router. The router is running the EIGRP routing protocol, and they want to move to a standards-based routing protocol. The new back-end servers are in the same segment as those used on floor 1. Mr. Sam mentioned that users complained of slow access to the servers. He also hands you a table with the current IP addresses (see Table 1).

Mr Sam would like a proposal to upgrade the network with updated switches that support Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop, redundant 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) fibre uplinks, and Power over Ethernet (PoE), and to provide 10 Gigabit Ethernet access to the servers. The proposal should also cover secure WLAN access with centralised management on floors 6 through 10. Include an IP addressing scheme that reduces the number of Class C networks the hospital uses. Mr. Sam wants to reduce the number of networks leased from the Internet service provider (ISP).

Provide the answers to the following questions/directives in Part A and verify them in Part B by implementing it in cisco packet tracer:

• What are Sydney Hospital's business requirements?
• Are there any business-cost constraints?
• What are the network's technical requirements?
• What are the network's technical constraints?
• Prepare a logical diagram of the current network.
• Does the hospital use IP addresses effectively?
• What do you recommend for improving the switching speed between floors?
• What IP addressing scheme would you propose Based on the number of servers and clients provided?
• What routing protocols do you recommend?
• What solution do you recommend for WLAN access and the network upgrade?
• Recommend and explain appropriate security measures.
• Draw the proposed network solution.

The report must follow the marking guide. Please note that citation of sources is mandatory and must be in the IEEE style.