Planning a Logical Network Design

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When you plan a logical network design you can either start from scratch or upgrade an existing
network.

Sufficient information about;

A. The networking components and hardware

B. Protocols
C. Topologies.

Physical Considerations
An inspection of the building should be an integral part of network planning. Ethernet cabling
should never be run next to high-voltage lines. It is also a good idea to keep network cabling
away from fluorescent light fixtures. Concrete firewalls and steel support beams can frustrate
your plans to make a short cable run from one location to another. A measuring tape and an
inspection of the proposed cable paths before deployment can save time and money.

1. Identifying the applications:

Applications to be the users including the following;

 Instant Messaging (IM),

 eMail and others.

2. Traffic Requirements: analyze the traffic pattern

A few point to consider include-

 Identification of major traffic sources.

 Categorization of traffic as local, distributed, client/server, peer-to-peer, terminal/host or
server/server.
 Estimation of bandwidth requirements for each application.
 Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for each application
 Reliability requirements.
3. Scalability Requirements: (the extent of network growth that should be supported) . future
expansion

Provisions that will enable addition of more users, applications,& external network connections.

4. Geographical considerations:

Departments /Buildings that are separated by large distance are to be linked together by optical
fiber. Similarly, Departmental buildings are to be linked by a LAN link.

Typically, the LAN links are high band width (100Mbps) and Optical fiber links are of lower
bandwidth (…………………….).

5. Availability: (the amount of time a network is available to users over a period of time)
Availability has direct relation with amount of redundancy required

6. Security and Accessibility:

Security specifications, including;

 a list of network services that will be provided such as FTP, Web, e-mail, etc.
 Who will be administering the security of these services
 How the people be trained on security policies and procedures
 Recovery plan, in case a security breach does take place.

7. Cost considerations:

For LANs, the tendency is to minimize the equipment cost. That is minimizing the cable cost,
minimizing the per port cost, and the labour cost.

For WANs the primary goal is to maximize the usage of the bandwidth.

server capability, internet access to the clients,

plan for the disaster recovery, data recovery and instant troubleshooting techniques