Online resources for University of  Greenwich, School of  Engineering
ASNT & AND
Winter Virtual Week Work


This week you are not expected to attend classes in person, however you are expected to work at home on your own. Below are instructions as to how you should spend your study time for this course during Virtual Week.

This week you should begin researching your next assignment.

As a network administrator of a medium to large network, you will be challenged in many different areas. For the purposes of this assignment, I have provided three typical challenges that you may face.

  1. Privacy of communications
  2. Throughput
  3. Quality of Service
For each of the three areas above, you will be expected to be able to provide documentation to indicate how your particular network will treat each of the three challenges above.

Privacy of Communications

This is a sensitive area. You may have conflicting views between balancing the rights of the individual against the aims of the company or organisation that the network is supporting.

Is it right to intercept employee (or user) network communications e.g. Facebook conversations, emails, web page history etc..

Please read this extract from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12.

" No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation."

You may also care to read the Draft Proposal: Declaration of Human Rights in Cyberspace

Careful research and a well balanced argument will be essential in obtaining a good score for this question. You will be expected to provide at least two opposing theoretical scenarios where privacy of communications would become an issue. This could be on ethical, corporate or any other grounds.

I am expecting to be able to read your views backed up by referenced evidence and whichever side you choose to come down on, remember there is no right or wrong answer here.

Throughput

This will be an area that you will have to face from time to time. The example that I have chosen for you to examine is migration of your network to support higher throughput. Remember that I am looking for the Engineering solution here so the correct approach would be to begin with a set of proposed constraints.

In your response to this question you could be required to consider availability, reliability, responsivity, user number, current architecture, proposal(s) for the future architecture and any other pertinent factors.

A  multi-homed network can supply at least two separate paths to the Internet. You may well need to consider a border gateway protocol to manage more than one entry/exit point to your network and BGP4 would be the ideal candidate here.

I will be looking for initial design considerations, possible implementation solutions, costings for the project and potential savings (if any). No actual software configurations will be required, however topologies showing the proposed network architecture may be appropriate.

Quality of Service

According to the ITU-T the Quality of Service (QoS) is defined as the "Totality of characteristics of a telecommunications service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated
and implied needs of the user of the service."
In the ITU-T document E.800 SERIES E: OVERALL NETWORK OPERATION, TELEPHONE SERVICE, SERVICE OPERATION AND
HUMAN FACTORS, four viewpoints of QoS are shown in the diagram below.


Discuss the challenges of providing QoS and discuss hardware and protocols that may be useful in achieving and providing a given level of network service.

The assignment itself will be available shortly.


MM Clements 18/10/2011