FNU Network Redesign Report

This report outlines a network redesign plan for The First National University (FNU), a higher education institution offering online and on-campus courses. FNU faces challenges including network slowdowns due to high user volume, lack of BYOD and WAT policies, and security concerns. The redesign aims to address these issues by improving scalability to accommodate a 50% enrollment increase in three years, enhancing online assignment submission reliability, implementing secure BYOD and WAT policies, and strengthening security measures. The report details FNU's business goals, including expanding partnerships and course offerings, and identifies technical goals such as improved scalability, availability (99.9% uptime, 6000-hour MTBF, <90-minute MTTR), network performance (bandwidth, throughput, latency, jitter, data loss), security, and manageability. The constraints include the absence of BYOD and WAT support, assignment submission issues, and outdated technology across campuses. The proposed redesign will leverage techniques like network load balancing to achieve scalability and enhance overall network performance and security.

Network Redesign for FNU
Overview
Business Domain:
The network redesigning is required at The First National University (FNU). FNU is a higher
educational organization for long distance learning. This is the first educational organization
providing online courses in the country. The university runs online training and courses; it requires a
network infrastructure of very high performance to provide Quality of Services to the end users. The
university covers 5 regional campuses and 10 metropolitan campuses and a main campus to run
such a huge educational institute. University offers undergraduates programs and postgraduate
programs through distance learning. Moreover it provides Vocational and Educational Training (VET)
as well as short programs for professionals to increase their skills. FNU teaches 45,000 students at
both undergraduate and postgraduate level for various programs on-campus whereas 15,000
students are studying off-campus for distance education at FNU. To ensure services to be delivered
at all the ends, FNU’s network is designed to divide into 3 facility centers. Firstly, Headquarters,
where main campus is located. Second, Operation i.e. Data Centre which is located 50 km away from
headquarters. At the Operations center, the technical staff is appointed for managing and
performing IT related tasks required for proper functioning of the network. The third division is the
Backup Facility. Backup facility is located 1000 km away from the main campus. This is because
backup facility is needed only when operation facility breaks down.
Network Issues:
1. As discussed above, due to heavy number of users on the network, it may result in network slow
down. The online submission is the key facility provided by FNU for ease of submission and
evaluation for the students as well as staff members. Due to online submission for both on-campus
and off-campus students, it has been observed quite a few times that the network problems
appear which makes the late submission for most of the students which in turn results in the bad
grades.
2. FNU has no Bring your own device (BYOD) and Work at home (WAT) policies embodied in the
network which is highly needed by the students and staff to make it possible to work from their
own devices. For this purpose, the secure wireless network should be implemented which
supports BYOD and WAT.
Immediate actions to take in regards of the identified issues:
1. Scalability for 50% increased enrollment in next three years.
2. Improvements with issues in online assignment submissions.
3. Implementation of bring your own device policy by adhering wireless network in the campus.
This enables the students to work on their own laptops, tablets, notebooks and smartphones.
4. With WAT it will allow users (students and staff members) to access network facilities from

their homes.
5. Security measures must be taken to safeguard data from the hackers.
6. Providing Quality of Services to the network users both at on-campus and off-campus.
Identify Organisation’s Needs and Constraints
Business Goals
FNU is divided into regional and metropolitan campuses that are all similar in size of infrastructure,
staff members and technology. These campuses are all well built with network and required
technologies which serves at its best to the students studying in that campus. With academic
teaching and learning activities both on-campus and off-campus, FNU also has 12 external partners
some of them are:
Hospital: FNU deals with providing training to students for hospitals. On the other fair side, FNU
helps hospitals to get their best interns at the optimum search. The hospitals get benefited by
appointing best candidates at their hospitals with limited searching. The university offers all the
medical related courses which help hospitals to get the best suited candidate.
Research Center: FNU may help students by providing current research practices due to its
partnerships with research centers. It benefits students for future reference. On the contrary, the
research centers uses data and statistics from the university to research further about a particular
field of interest. FNU ties up with such research centers to allow them to perform researches in
some areas.
Vendor Support and Technology are other fields FNU have partnerships with which one or the
other way benefits the students learning process. Also, the FNU offers campus interviews for the
students to get placed in various companies which in turn benefit the companies for selecting best
candidates on the basis of their grades.
As per the requirements discussed above for FNU, it becomes very important to identify the
organizations goals to provide best services to the users of the network, be it students, teaching staff or
technical staff. The business goals are as elaborated below:
1. The university is currently having 45,000 students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level
for various programs on-campus whereas 15,000 students are studying off-campus for distance
education. Future goal of university is to expect new enrollments of 50% rise in upcoming three
years. From the business point of view, the FNU is preparing to add new students both on-
campus and off-campus. FNU presumes to increase the students at the largest possible rate by
providing learning in new and currently trending fields.
2. The FNU provides day learning courses for on-campus students. These activities can also be
extended to short training programs to attract more students and get more enrollments on-
campus. Some short training courses should also be undertaken with certification that will
attract more students seeking for on-campus education for limited time period.
3. The off-campus online courses provided by the university are limited to some extents. To
increase the enrollments, it is required to introduce new training courses. With new courses

added in online training or long distance learning it is possible to attract off-campus students for
distance education.
4. As far as partnership related expansion is concerned, the FNU administrative and managerial
staff must communicate with more hospitals, companies and research centers. These partners
extension result in attracting more students. Also it may result in recognition from various other
universities.
5. To provide large number of courses for huge number of students, FNU is aiming to provide the
best network for the users. The current goal is to redesign the university network to provide end
to end services without any interruption. Many students using network all the time must have a
heavy load at every moment. FNU aims to use better network policies for the entire network.
6. Foremost goal of FNU is to increase students and this increase in students will result in heavy
loads at metropolitan campuses. This will result in increased number of regional campuses for
distributing students.
7. University also aims at providing BYOD and WAT policies in the network for more usability in the
network.
Needs of improvements in FNU Network:
1. Since several numbers of students and staff members uses the network, FNU network must be
very good at providing best performance. Right from internet surfing to downloading files,
sending emails and providing high end network performance is the high need of the network.
2. The business goal of FNU is to increase number of students by 50% in the next three years;
hence it requires a network design which is highly scalable in nature. New PCs at campus must
be added up in the network without much overhead is the basic need of the network since more
number of students is expected to be increasing in upcoming years.
3. The university provides off-campus distance learning and hence must be available at any time
for its distance learners. Moreover, it requires the student’s on-campus to submit their
assignments online; hence availability of network is very important at that part as well.
4. FNU must also provide Bring Your Own Device and Work AT Home policies in the network for
more usability in the network. These policies are highly needed at the university since it is
affecting the usability of the network. Once more and more personal devices can be connected
to the network, it will affect in overall students learning process.
5. FNU needs to implement a secure wireless network which safeguards student’s login
credentials, files, and other important assets. Moreover, it may restrict the intruder getting into
the network by facilitating strict security measures. Authentication will also need once BYOD
and WAT policies discussed above are implemented in the network to filter illegal activities. The
other security measures should also be taken to protect important files in the server.
Constraints in FNU network
1. Foremost limitation of FNU network is that it does not support bring-your-own-device (BYOD)
which makes it difficult for students to migrate their work from university PCs to laptops and
vice versa. With this limitation students cannot work from their own laptops, notebooks or
tablets.

2. The network does not support work at home (WAT) policy which does not allow users to access
university network from their personal spaces. WAT must be provided by the university which
will help staff members to carry their pending work out from their homes.
3. Another noticeable limitation is that it sometimes fails to upload assignments due to poor
performance which leads in late submission of homework. This eventually results in poor grades
of the students. The load at the deadline of the submission is observed to be very heavy in the
network which results in slow down of the network and hence students are unable to upload
their assignments on time.
4. The main campus of the university holds large number of users including students and staff.
Other campuses like regional and metropolitan campuses are in similar sizes and technology
usage. All those campuses use old complex technologies which are out-dated and results in
poor performance of the network.
Some technical issues are also noticed in the network which is needed to be noticed and fixed as early as
possible. The technical goals related to the university network as discussed below:
Technical Goals:
1. Scalability
Scalability can be best defined as the ability of the network to ensure no degradation in overall
network performance even if the network size in increased. Scalability is one of the most
important features a sound network can attain. It is the property of the network to add devices
to its existing cluster in such a manner that new added devices do not collectively form a load
that exceeds the cluster’s collective load to offer adequate performance. Scalability once
attained on the network, provides good quality of services in the network since it eventually
relates to the network performance.
The redesigned FNU network must have this feature so that it can be scaled to support
extended usage of services including multimedia applications. This feature is important in FNU
so as to include online teaching in its training part. FNU must provide scalable network for
further enrollments of the new students both on-campus and off-campus. This features must be
employed everywhere at all the campuses. There are several techniques to attain scalability
these are, Network Load Balancing (NLB), scaling up and scaling out. Network load balancing is
the trustworthy technique that allows the network to assess the load on the network and
balance it to provide better network performance. FNU network needs high scalability for its
goal to enroll 50% of the current strength in next three years.
2. Availability (half a page)
The organizations with multiple data centers, network availability are a vital concern. To
perform operations daily such as downloading files from server at FNU requires high need
of network availability because users performing daily operations in the network need the
network to be available all the time. Availability is serious when it comes to disaster

planning and recovery. FNU aims at providing a network that is available approximately
99.9 percent of the time and offers an MTBF (mean-time-between-failure) of 6000 hours
and an MTTR (mean-time-to- repair) of less than 90 minutes. Network availability with
these values can never fail even at the students’ submission deadlines. As per students
complaints about network slow down at the time of submission, the network with such
availability metrics can fulfill their request of network availability. A key concern FNU’s
students and staff is concerned about is availability of network at their personal spaces so
that they can work from home as well. Implementing WAT in the FNU network is in
demand from students and staff of the network.
3. Network performance
The overall network statistics assessment to define and analyze if the network is capable
of serving quality of services is termed as network performance. It quantitatively and
qualitatively assesses the performance of the computer network which tells the network
administrator to observe, analyze and improve the services provided by the network.
Network performance is measured as:
Bandwidth: metrics for data transfer rate.
Throughput: the maximum amount of data transferred at one time in the network.
Delay and latency: The extra time taken by the: data than the stipulated one.
Jitter: the difference in data flow within the network due to congestion.
Data loss: Data drop before its delivery to the recipient.
The above mentioned parameters define the overall network performance of the
network. Any of the parameter is failing to achieve its quality in the network leads to
complete drop of network performance. FNU wants to provide a wireless network that is
privately secured for students, staff members and visitors as well. With many users on
the network, FNU needs to be redesigned to fully satisfy the network performance.
FNU’s network must also have a response time less than a second for interactive
applications. The network administrators must increase the bandwidth of the Internet
connection to support new applications in the network.
4. Security (half a page)
Security is a key concern in any network even if it is as small as ten computers. FNU’s big
network is under the threat of security breaches. With wireless network, security comes into
picture since wireless network themselves are less secure. Some security measures are needed
to be employed in the network to make it secure. Network security is the act of safeguarding
network data as well as network devices from intruders and malware attacks. With large
number of users and several numbers of devices in the network, security is a key feature to
work on.
FNU’s network must be redesigned to protect the end to end device connections. Moreover, it is
needed to safeguard network from hackers stealing authentication and authorization rights in
the network. To achieve high level of security, network layer of the protocol stack implements
various algorithms, policies and controls which benefits by providing access to the authorized

users in the network while prohibiting false users to enter into the network. Security not only
protects your personal data and login credentials in the network but ultimately protects your
reputation. FNU with so many users at a time needs a concrete security measures so that no
reputation will be threatened.
5. Manageability
A network is said to be manageable if it allows most of its tasks to be automated. The FNU
network is very huge with different and diverse tasks and services within the network.
Manageability is required at the IP support end where there are many tasks to work on
especially regarding network management. If more of the tasks are automated, the network
itself reduces most of the burden from IP support staff. These tasks include:
1. Network Configuration
2. Data Backups
3. Load Balancing
4. Network Management
5. Network Monitoring
6. Troubleshooting
7. Updates
The tasks once performed by itself, network is said to be manageable. FNU’s network should
also be redesigned to perform several tasks by its own.