Data Communication and Networking: Network Architecture Report

This report provides a comprehensive overview of the network architecture designed for Seagull International, a growing business planning to establish an office in Sydney. The report details the network setup, including the devices and their interconnections, illustrated with a network diagram. It covers the configuration of the network, encompassing routers, switches, and various devices for administrative staff, data entry operators, and the sales team. The document addresses the remote access setup for the sales team, utilizing VPNs for secure connectivity. The report outlines the specifications for the operating systems and hardware for servers and regular office systems. Furthermore, it discusses internet and telephone connectivity, wireless LAN security, and IP address allocation for all devices. The report concludes by summarizing the network architecture, providing a complete plan for Seagull International to set up their office, and includes references for all the cited information.

Running head: NETWORK ARCHITECTURE
NETWORK ARCHITECTURE
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

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Executive summary
The report provides a detailed view of the network architecture of the Seagull International
Company. It details the network setup along with the devices needed to create the network.
This part is illustrated with a network diagram. The report also discusses the remote access of
the network along with the wireless security solutions needed for secure communications.
The report addresses the IP address allocation to network devices connected to the office
network. It also demonstrates the setup of the internet and telephone connection between the
admin and the data entry teams. The operating system needed for server and regular office
systems have also been discussed in this report. The diagrams shown in this report have been
created by the author using Microsoft Visio. The report concludes with an overall summary
of the report.

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Discussion..................................................................................................................................4
Network diagram....................................................................................................................4
Operating system and hardware specifications......................................................................5
Remote connection setup.......................................................................................................6
Internet and telephone connectivity.......................................................................................7
Wireless LAN security...........................................................................................................8
IP address allocation..............................................................................................................9
Conclusion................................................................................................................................10
References................................................................................................................................11

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Introduction
The Seagull international is a business which is slowly developing. The management of the
company is planning to open an office in Sydney. The office is designed to support a staff of
about 50 members working from two different locations. The staff is divided in three
sections: administrative staff, data entry operators and the sales team. In this report, a
network solution will be provided and discussed to demonstrate the setup of different devices
in the office which includes computers, laptops, printers, databases, routers and switches. The
report will also illustrate the connectivity and security issues of the new network along with
the allocation of new separate IP addresses to these devices. The report will analyse the
company structure and set up a network architecture for the company.

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Discussion
Network diagram
Figure 1 Overall Network Diagram (Source: created by author)
The network diagram illustrates the connection between different devices in a office network
and how they are all interconnected to each other and the internet. The ISP provides the
internet to the office which is then routed via the main router to three wireless access points.
The main router also transmits the internet connection to three 6 port Ethernet switches and
four 5 port Ethernet switches via a firewall (Wu, Xiao and Ni, 2012). The firewall is an
important part of the office security setup. The three 6 port Ethernet switches are used by the
18 administrative staff computers and the four 5 port Ethernet switches are used by the 20
data entry operators. The two wireless access points directly connected to the main router are
used by the visitors in the reception area and the sales team in the office via their

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smartphones, laptops, tablets, etc. The third separate access point is for the sales team to
connect to the office servers from a remote location. The main router is also connected to
printers, VoIP phones and a database server for the employees to access and use.
Operating system and hardware specifications
The hardware for the computers and laptops can be of the following configurations:
CPU: Intel core i5
RAM: 8GB
HDD: 1TB
Operating system: Windows 10 Enterprise
These specification is excellent for normal office usage including running the sales software,
spreadsheets, word processing, database use and the internet. These desktops and laptops can
be used by the data entry operators and the sales team respectively. The Windows 10 OS is
more than enough to handle the daily job needs of these employees like running normal
office applications.
The administrative teams accessing the main servers and running all the major operations
would need a little more powerful machines for their jobs. The device specifications for these
employees are:
CPU: Intel core i7
RAM: 12GB
HDD: 2 TB
Operating system: Windows 10 Enterprise

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The machine running the server will need a Intel Xeon processor combined with 32 GB RAM
and a massive hard disk probably around 8TB. The operating system used by the servers
would be the Microsoft Windows Server. This OS based on the Windows 10 architecture is
more than capable enough of handling multiple user connections and is more designed for the
network needs of the company rather than single user OS. Therefore, unlike normal OS this
server OS supports greater amount of RAM, unlimited user connections and can act as an
email, a web or a database server.
Remote connection setup
Figure 2 Remote connection setup diagram (Source: created by author)
The sales team before shifting to the office in Sydney would need to access the Seagulls
international’s main business office from a remote location via the internet. This connection
can be achieved with the help of an extra server and a Virtual Private Network or VPN
(Kennington, Olinick and Rajan, 2010) software working on both the user systems and the
office servers. The server that will be needed to authenticate the network access request
coming via the VPN enabled internet network would be the Network Access Server or the
NAS. The NAS would be connected to the mainframe controller and to the database servers.
The employee can access the office data via this network and securely login in the client
software. This way the employee can access the corporate network remotely from their own
laptops.

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Internet and telephone connectivity
Figure 3 Internet and telephone connection diagram (Source: created by author)
Each and every team is provided with internet connections and telephone connectivity for
communication and work purposes. These telephones are VoIP telephones that are directly
connected to the internet (Comer 2018). The internet coming from the main router is
distributed to these devices via other switches and modems. The normal computers get
internet from the main router via the Ethernet switches and the VoIP telephones get their
internet connectivity from the phone adapters which is directly connected to the internet via
the main router.

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The parallel connections due to their separate nature gives equal performance to both
the teams to work and communicate efficiently. The network performance can be kept
constant with the use of sufficient bandwidth proportional to the company’s needs (Shuja et
al. 2016). Lower bandwidth and increased traffic can lead to network performance loss.
Client end solution software like Citrix could be used on the employee machines to reduce
network congestion by streamlining the data flow in the network.
Wireless LAN security
Figure 4 Wireless LAN security diagram (Source: created by author)
The wireless LAN security is one of the most important things to consider when using the
wifi. The security issues arising from this setup can be solved in the following ways:
1. The wireless network can be safeguarded using authentication techniques like a
shared key authentication (WEP) or SSID authentication. Nowadays the safest
security standard for wireless authentication used widely is WPA2.

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2. The network connection between the office main server and the ISP could be secured
by using a virtual private network or VPN to make the network more secure. Example
of VPN software are Cisco VPN and NetScreen.
3. The wireless access point or the network gateway can also be configured using the
wireless gateway authentication (Lee et al. 2016) which eliminates the use of any
client software and creates individual wireless gateways for each subnet. Example of
wireless gateway authentication are Bluesocket and ReefEdge.
IP address allocation
The IP addresses for each of the machine involved need to be allocated (Sun et al. 2019). The
network devices connected to the internet would be the devices used by the employees of the
company including the sales team working from a remote location. The total number of
devices including the sales team laptops connected to the internet would be 50.
The allocation of IP addresses for the office network is given below:
Subne
t
Name
Neede
d Size
Allocate
d Size
Network
Address
CIDR Dec Mask Assignable
Range
Broadcas
t IP
Admi
n team
18 30 156.50.0.
32
/27 255.255.25
5.224
156.50.0.
33 -
156.50.0.
62
156.50.
0.63
Data
entry
team
20 30 156.50.0.
0
/27 255.255.25
5.224
156.50.0.
1 -
156.50.0.
30
156.50.
0.31
The allocation of IP addresses for the sales team accessing from a remote location is
given below:
Subn
et
Name
Neede
d Size
Allocate
d Size
Network
Address
CIDR Dec Mask Assignable
Range
Broadcast
IP
Sales 12 14 124.180. /28 255.255.25 124.180.0 124.180.0

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team 0.0 5.240 .1 -
124.180.0
.14
.15
The extra IP addresses allocated will come handy in the future in case of up gradations in the
above mentioned teams when the team sizes will increase. The rest of the extra devices could
be accommodated within the extra allotted IP addresses. The primary IP address for the
company network is 156.50.0.0 and the primary IP address of the sales team accessing
remotely is 124.180.0.0.
Conclusion
To conclude, the above report summarizes the network requirements for the Seagull
international company for their office in Sydney. The network setup is highlighted by the
network diagram provided in this report. The report also explains the operating system
specification of the new systems and their use. The report illustrates the remote location
network accessing setup for the sales team with the help of a diagram. The internet and
telephone connectivity between the office teams and their setup is also shown with the help
of a diagram. The WLAN security issue from network connection and its possible solution is
explained with the help of a diagram in this report. The report concludes with the IP address
allocation of the network connected devices including the remotely accessing sales team.
Overall, the report provides the company a full network architecture plan to setup their office.

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References
Comer, D.E., 2018. The Internet book: everything you need to know about computer
networking and how the Internet works. Chapman and Hall/CRC.
Kennington, J., Olinick, E. and Rajan, D. eds., 2010. Wireless network design: Optimization
models and solution procedures (Vol. 158). Springer Science & Business Media.
Lee, W., Nam, K., Roh, H.G. and Kim, S.H., 2016, January. A gateway based fog computing
architecture for wireless sensors and actuator networks. In 2016 18th International
Conference on Advanced Communication Technology (ICACT) (pp. 210-213). IEEE.
Shuja, J., Bilal, K., Madani, S.A., Othman, M., Ranjan, R., Balaji, P. and Khan, S.U., 2016.
Survey of techniques and architectures for designing energy-efficient data centers. IEEE
Systems Journal, 10(2), pp.507-519.
Sun, L., Tian, G., Zhu, G., Liu, Y., Shi, H. and Dai, D., 2019, April. Multipath IP routing on
end devices: motivation, design, and performance. In 2018 IFIP Networking Conference
(IFIP Networking) and Workshops (pp. 1-9). IEEE.
Wu, K., Xiao, J. and Ni, L.M., 2012. Rethinking the architecture design of data center
networks. Frontiers of Computer Science, 6(5), pp.596-603.

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