FIT3165/FIT4165 Assignment:
Network Plan and a Design.
Semester 1 - 2022
Dr. Charith Jayasekara
Lecturer, Faculty of IT
Email: charith.jayasekara@monash.edu
© 2022, Monash University
April 25, 2022
Revision Status
version 1: April 2022 by Charith Jayasekara
Submission Guidelines
Deadline: Week-12, Friday 27th May 2022, 11:55pm
Marks: This assignment is worth 20% of your unit marks.
Submission format: This assignment has two parts. Part 1 is writing a technical report (worth
60%) and Part 2 consists of network design, CORE implementation and a video presentation (worth
40%). Before the due date, a soft copy of your technical report (a PDF file) with the standard
assignment format, CORE network design file (imn file) and a 10-minute (max) video that shows
the operation of the network design must be submitted to Moodle via the submission link provided
under “Assessments” section on the Moodle as individual files. Zero marks will be awarded for part
2 of the assignment if the video is not provided. You can use any freely available PDF converter.
Your report will be checked using Turnitin for Plagiarism.
When you submit the assignment in Moodle, please make sure to submit your work properly. No
submissions should be left in the draft mode. Before the expiry of the deadline, make sure to hit
the Submit button to complete your submission. If the submission is in draft mode, your
submission will NOT be considered for marking.
Late submissions:
• By submitting a special consideration form
• Without an approved special consideration request, you lose 10% of your mark per day
that you submit late.
Plagiarism: This is an individual assignment. Group work is not allowed. It is an academic
requirement that your submitted work be original. Zero marks will be awarded for the whole
submission if there is any evidence of copying, collaboration, pasting from websites, or copying
from textbooks. When you are asked to use Internet resources to answer a question, this does not
mean copying and pasting text from websites. Write answers in your own words such that your
understanding of the answer is evident.
Interview: Your tutors may conduct an interview in special circumstances (Collusion, Plagiarism
etc.) to assess your work. If you cannot explain your work or what you have written in your report,
we need to report you to the academic Integrity committee for further action, and your marks will
be either reduced or given “0”.
If you need extra help: This assignment is an independent learning and assessment exercise.
You may utilise the Ed Discussion Forum to ask questions and obtain clarification. Additionally,
you can join any of the scheduled consultation sessions to seek support, however, you may not
share any details or designs in your implementation with other students, nor may you show working
to the teaching team prior to the submission. This is an assessment task: tutors and lecturers are not
permitted to help you to check errors in your assignment work (you are expected to check the
correctness or troubleshoot your CORE network design), but can help with more general queries,
such as queries related to syntax, concepts and troubleshooting tips. You may make use of online
references with appropriate citation in accordance with academic integrity policies, however, your
work must be your own.
© 2022, Faculty of IT, Monash University
Part 1 – Report (60%): The Technical Report should look professional (assume this report will be
submitted to your manager), which means you need to pay attention to spelling, punctuation,
grammar. It is important that your report has a clear structure. Write a report with a maximum of 8
pages, with a font size of at least 12pt with 2cm margins. The page limit doesn’t include images,
tables, references etc. Any text beyond the page limit will not be assessed. You may use a FIT
standard report format. Please note NO handwritten work or hand drawn diagrams will be accepted
for your submission.
**Note: Later part of the report should include a few details related to part 2 of the assignment (this
section will not be included in the page count).
You can find great tips on how to prepare a report on Monash’s web pages. Here is the link to get
started:
Language and Learning and Online website: https://www.monash.edu/learnhq
Software tools for drawing sitemaps: any drawing tool should work, for example LucidChart,
Visio, online tools or even presentation tools such as PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides. Scans
of hand-drawn maps are acceptable if they are neat and readable.
Part 2 – CORE network design and a 10 minutes (max) video (40%): You are required to
design the network using CORE according to the given specifications. Then a video of maximum 10
minutes long (any video longer than 10 minutes will not be assessed. It’s okay to have a video
shorter than 10 minutes. i.e., 5 or 6 mins).
© 2022, Faculty of IT, Monash University
Part 1 - An Enterprise Network Design (60%)
A Request for Proposal (RFP) to Design Wired LANs, Wireless LANs,
Distribution network / support Backbone Wide Area Network (WAN)
1.1 Description
Objective
A public financing company requires its office buildings to be connected over a wired LAN,
Wireless LAN (WLAN), and WAN connections (building to building). You have been asked to
respond to prepare an RFP for this scenario.
Scope of the Work
The company has 150 employees and expects to expand their business by hiring more
employees. To match with the requirements, they are acquiring two new 4 storey buildings
located opposite the main road to the existing building. Due to the expansions, the company is
expecting to hire 260 new employees. Each new employee will be provided with an office space
or a cubicle with a multimedia desktop having a wired network LAN connection. (See Figure 1
for Building-A, and Figure 2 for Building-B).
Two newly acquired buildings will be used to accommodate all the new staff members as
follows:
(i) Building A: 160 new staff members
(ii) Building B: 100 new staff members.
For each building, new staff will be equally distributed among each floor.
The new buildings have NOT been wired for network connections. Each floor has a wiring closet
where necessary horizontal and vertical structured cabling can be installed. Each wiring closet is
in the Lift and Service wells area as shown in the figure 1 & figure 2.
The service wells also have vertical risers where fiber optic cables can run through floor to floor
to a dedicated server room on the ground floor. Both the new buildings require horizontal and
vertical cabling. The networks in the two new buildings should be connected to the main
existing building across the road via a distribution network. The width of the road is 100 meters.
© 2022, Faculty of IT, Monash University
The networks that will be implemented must provide both wired and wireless connectivity for the
staff members. Each staff member will receive a staff PC and they also can use their own device too.
A high-resolution video conferencing software (VoIP), business applications and other usual
packages such as web, email and regular office software will be installed in both staff and personal
devices. Therefore, anticipated average network traffic generated by each active user is estimated to
be around 15-20 Mbps. The Wired LAN infrastructure needs to be designed to support the
maximum peak traffic.
In addition to the wired traffic, wireless traffic also should be accounted for. Wireless traffic can be
considered as 20% of wired traffic. Wireless Access Points (APs) should be connected to the wired
infrastructure.
Capacity of the network in the existing building (which is located across the road) will also be
improved to accommodate the increased traffic owing to the services that will be given to the new
staff members. You are NOT required to consider improvement plans for the existing network.
Employees are expected to access the main office network and its resources frequently. So, from the
business perspective, it is important that the WAN connectivity is maintained with a higher
reliability all the time. Loss of connectivity is not an option here.
Your proposed solution must be realistic and design tradeoffs should be considered (i.e metrics such
as implementation cost).
© 2022, Faculty of IT, Monash University
1.2 Requirements
Submissions for this assignment should be in the form of a technical report with explanatory
figures and other requirements for reporting. The assignment specifications are in the form of a
request for proposal (RFP) to potential suppliers. An RFP is a solicitation often made through a
bidding process by any company interested in the design and procurement of installation contract
services. This assignment provides an opportunity for you to work individually and apply Data
Communications and Computer Networking concepts to a practical network design. You are
required to design the network, provide recommendations based on the RFP requirements and
present your solutions in a formal report. In the RFP, the company expects you to give them
enough arguments in support of your network design to convince them, with respect to benefits of
the proposed network and new technologies you have proposed. You may need to do small
research to find differences between technologies. Give detailed explanation of the proposed
technologies that would be integrated in the network design.
You must include the following information in response to the RFP:
a) Executive Summary:
b) Introduction:
c) Project Requirements: A requirement brief is usually a detailed list of the required
tasks to be completed and proposed equipment derived from the Objectives and
Scope of Work section of the RFP.
d) LAN, WLAN, Distribution / Backbone, and WAN Design, Assumptions, and
Justifications:
i. Explain LAN, WLAN, Backbone, and WAN design logic including the choices of
equipment (e.g., switches, routers, APs etc.) and structured cabling. You must
propose specific devices from a particular vendor (i.e. CISCO, Juniper ,etc). Explain
methods used to estimate the required performance of devices and links (i.e. max
network traffic per floor, per building etc.). Report all the assumptions made in your
network design.
ii. Justify switch and wireless AP locations, horizontal and vertical cable paths and
lengths between the floors. Explain the routers, switches, and APs functional
specifications. Assume the floor to ceiling height as 3 meters approximately
including the false ceiling.
iii. Propose an IPv4 address plan for the new buildings with proper subnetting and
minimal unused addresses.
e) Recommendations and Justification: A summary of your recommendations with a
statement of justification.
f) Conclusion
*Note: List of equipment, their specifications, technical data, and device related cabling
specifications etc. should be included in the Appendix.
© 2022, Faculty of IT, Monash University
The technical report should contain the following important diagrams to support your proposal:
a) A conceptual high-level diagram showing the complete network design including LAN,
WLAN, Backbone, and WAN connectivity to the main office.
b) Typical floor plans (only one floor would be sufficient for each new building) showing
computer desktop layout, network topology, WLAN AP, and structured cabling.
c) Backbone connection diagrams (using schematic diagrams of cross-section of a building
showing switches, routers, and servers etc.).
d) WAN connectivity for the two new buildings connecting with the head office (main)
building.
Reporting Instructions
Writing reports is an essential skill of any IT career. You are expected to deliver reports that are
accurate and factual, that provide evidence for your findings, and must look professional.
Before you start
Before starting to write, think about your audience, i.e., who is reading the report? Don’t write for
your tutors. Write for your customer (Transport Company).
Sources and referencing
Any claims or recommendations that you make should be substantiated with supporting references.
That means that you cannot just claim that A is better than B, you must argue why that is the case
and point to external sources that can serve as evidence. You can use the unit’s recommended
textbooks and other standard literature as sources, but you will also need to use additional
documentation to find technical information and commercial details for this report. Whenever you
use material from an external source, make sure to include them in your list of references and cite
them properly in your document. You also need to assess the quality and reliability of any source.
Always use credible sources such as, journal and peer reviewed conference papers, books, technical
reports and avoid less credible sources such as blogs. References should be listed correctly. You
may lose marks for poor referencing. You should use the APA referencing style, which is explained
in detail here:
[https://guides.lib.monash.edu/citing-referencing/apa7th].
© 2022, Faculty of IT, Monash University
Part 2 – A network design implemented using CORE and a
video that explains the operation of the network (40%)
2.1 Providing IP plans and designing the network using CORE.
Here you are required to implement a network using CORE with the following specifications.
Use the following IP block given to provide effective IP plan for 3 subnets shown as below
Figure 3: Network Diagram
IP block given: 176.16.0.0/20
If your student ID is ABCDEFGH, using this notation, the networks will have the following number
of PCs.
● NET A – GH PCs
● NET B – DE PCs
● NET C – ABC PCs.
For example, if your student id is 23456789, Then
● NET A – 89 PCs
● NET B – 56 PCs
● NET C – 234 PCs
2.1.1 Use the IP address block given to design a best possible IP plan for the network. (10%)
You are required to provide the following with detailed working.
a) Network Address
b) Broadcast address
c) Usable IP address range
For each network including point to point links.
© 2022, Faculty of IT, Monash University
2.1.2 Implement the network using CORE (10%)
2.1.3 Configure the router RC to provide DHCP for the subnet NET C and set IP addresses
of all other devices in the network static. (5%)
2.1.4 Configure static routing for subnet NET C and dynamic routing using RIP for other
networks. Devices in each network should be able to reach any device in any of the
networks. Use the ping command to test the connectivity between the devices. (10%)
When implementing individual networks, you only need to connect 2-3 PCs to each subnetwork.
2.2 A video explaining the operation of CORE network design. (5%)
Record a short video (10 minutes maximum) showing how your simulation works. Your video must
include;
a) How you have configured the router RC to provide DHCP for subnet NET C. You are
required to show how you configured the DHCP by going into the configuration panels.
b) How you have configured static and dynamic routing within the network by showing
corresponding configuration panels.
c) How you have configured devices in the subnet NET C as DHCP clients.
d) How do you start your CORE network simulation?
e) Show the IP address obtained by one of the PCs in the network where DHCP is configured.
Use the ifconfig command.
f) Show routing information of each router using ip route show commands.
g) Demonstrate full network connectivity using ping commands.
**Note: Your video must NOT be longer than 10 minutes.
Zero marks will be awarded for part 2 of the assignment if the video is not provided.
Submission Checklist
1. A pdf containing Part 1 Report and Part 2.1 Calculations.
2. An imn file that contains the CORE network design
3. A video file that explains the operation of the CORE network.
You must submit all the files as individual files to the Moodle. DO NOT Zip them.
© 2022, Faculty of IT, Monash University