Campus Network Design - a new approach

What is a campus network?
It is a network that connects many users and is under the control of a single administrative group. The campus network can spread over a set of buildings and these buildings may be closely spaced or some miles apart. The network is likely to have to support many different types of users with a variety of needs from their IT.


Why a new approach?
For 20 or more years, the tenets of computer network design have remained fairly solid. The goal of the network was to provide a bit-pipe on-demand between any two points. Despite minor physical layer changes and improvements, the three tier model for network design has remained the map to providing an efficient network.

As network demands increased, the internetworking hardware available became faster and more sophisticated in terms of options. Unfortunately, the physical layer performance has not increased in line with Moore's law meaning that  PC performance increase has overtaken the increases in performance of the network.


Gone are the days whan the average user was content to browse static HTML and send a few emails.
PC users today are much more demanding for interactivity and use a range of networked applications, many of which are hungry for bandwidth. Youtube, torrents, peer-to-peer file sharing, Myspace and SecondLife are just some examples of networked applications that demand bandwidth from their attached network.

Computer applications and their attached networks have penetrated nearly every business, replacing the analogue parts of the work-model  wherever possible and increasing efficiency, accuracy and availability. The network itself has become a company resource and is an indispensable part of the majority of today's businesses. The performance of the network in delivering the benefits of the applications running on the attached computers is key to the successful operation of the business that the network is supporting.


Hardware Changes to allow new Design

The distribution layer will need to contain intelligent devices to carry out the deep packet inspection. This does not dramatically change the role of this layer and leaves the core unchanged. Access layer may need newer technologies to implement security at the required level. Exactly how these changes may be implemented will be the focus of later lectures in this course.




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