Designing Campus Networks
(Publisher: Macmillan Computer Publishing)
Author(s): Terri Quinn-andry; Kitty Haller
ISBN: 1578700302
Publication Date: 02/01/98

Introduction

A number of good books have been written on the various technical aspects of networking, including devices, networking protocols, routing protocols, and technologies. Network administrators and designers wishing to learn and apply the technical nuts and bolts of networking have no shortage of references to consult.

More difficult to find have been system-wide perspectives; resources for ways to put all the nuts and bolts together to form an elegant, well-designed network. We wrote this book to address that shortage of information for one category of networks—campus LANs—by examining them from a practical design perspective. The scope extends from individual design characteristics to the ways that multiple design goals must be integrated and built into the campus LAN.

Objectives

Too often, network designers get caught up in the technology du jour, or get sold on the fastest product on the market, without looking at what their networks truly need to run efficiently. The goal of Designing Campus Networks is to help network designers and administrators understand the issues and problems they face within campus networks today, and then design their networks for optimal performance and future scalability.

Audience

Network administrators and designers, who are either developing new campus networks or managing the evolution of existing ones, are the intended audience for Designing Campus Networks. The concepts in this book are generally straightforward and intuitive, so the prerequisite knowledge is simply a basic understanding of what a network is, what it does, and why it exists. However, to apply this book's concepts you will need a deeper understanding—from experience or other resources—of network devices, technologies, network protocols, and routing protocols.

Organization

This book is organized into three parts, reflecting the increasing complexity of design characteristics, and concludes with sample blueprints of campus LANs.

Part One, “Traffic Patterns,” focuses on traffic, the most fundamental, pervasive element that must be analyzed and managed in order to design an efficient network. Critical patterns and types of traffic are examined in distinct chapters.

Part Two, “Essential Elements of Design,” turns to the more complex, often intertwined design characteristics that designers and administrators must build into the network, including redundancy, security, and mobility.

Part Three, “Campus Design and Implementation,” brings together the concepts and network characteristics from Parts One and Two into sample designs for, respectively, simple, scalable, and complex networks.

The text explains technical terms and references as they arise in chapters. For reference purposes, a glossary of terms and an appendix of technical references, including RFCs and Internet-drafts, are presented at the end of the book.

Approach

This book takes a system-wide design approach to campus LANs. As such, we do not delve into details of implementation and configuration; presumably, readers are already familiar with such details for the applications and devices on their particular networks. For the same reason, we also do not go into detail about the individual technologies, devices, and protocols that exist in campus networks. The concern here is developing the overall campus network to meet critical design goals: efficient traffic flow, resiliency, security, mobility, and scalability.

In particular, the design goal of scalability emerges as a theme throughout campus LAN design. Scalability is a ubiquitous, but sometimes neglected, goal. The designer's perspective almost never can be just on the present uses and circumstances of the network. Questions about future growth and change must be considered, even if they need not be addressed immediately. Individual chapters and topics throughout Designing Campus Networks address ways to design scalability into the network.

We provide network blueprints as a basis for network design. The blueprints are detailed enough to enable understanding and implementation, but generic enough so that each network designer can use a blueprint as a foundation on which to build the desired unique network design.