Wide Area Network And Cloud Computing: A Comprehensive Overview

1. What are the wide area networks and what types of WAN are you familiar with?
2. Pick three types of WAN: describe, provide basic structure and/or configuration, explain potential use in healthcare settings. Research the latter subject in literature, if necessary.
3. What Big Data applications suitable for cloud computing are you familiar with? List, describe, and justify at least three applications from the required reading, and at least two applications researched on your own. Please remember to maintain strong healthcare focus in your selections and analysis.
4. What is domain name system, what is its purpose, how does it work?
5. Describe the concepts of DICOM and PACS. What is the fundamental difference between these two terminologies?
 

Introduction to Wide Area Network

Wide Area Network connects several local area networks (LAN) to one other over a large scale network. Speed of transferring the data depends on the cost of connection which future depends on the distance of the router. WAN are not managed or controlled by a single entity these are retained by distributed ownership. Wired network area allows end user to access the application, services that are centrally located (Nobre, Mozzaquatro & Granville, 2018). This provides secured transmission of data packet over network and WAN doesn’t require installing same application on multiple resources.

WAN is like banking system, where several different remote branches are connected over a network to share their official data (Nafi, Ahmed, Gregory & Datta, 2018). Internet is the largest Wide Area Network in the domain. Various WAN networks are available, some are:

Circuit Switching – Circuit switching is mostly used in dialup connections by creating a   path in the network so that synchronous communication can take place between end points. In this bit delay is constant and provides continuous data transfer without overhead. Example: Optical mesh network, cellular network.

Packet Switching is done by dividing the data into smaller packets and transmitting it over network. Bandwidth is pooled among the nodes. It has a high speed for transferring the data packets. It may sometimes cause indefinite transfer delay

Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) - It is based on synchronous, bit oriented data transfer basically designed for transmission of digital voice, video over network. It is useful for video conferencing from remote areas.

Asynchronous Transfer Mode- It provides functionality of both packet switching and circuit switching.  It uses connection oriented approach and establishes virtual circuit before actual exchange of data packets. It is globally available and least expensive also uses VPN technology for strong security.

Different Types of WAN and their basic structure or configuration

Frame Relay: It is a wide area network that handles the communication between data packets over a frequently changing path. It is extremely simple to implement and less expensive. It connects to remote LANs via virtual circuits and once the packets reaches to the destination it is charged according to its usage.

It puts the data packets in variable size frames and leaves the less important packets, by prioritizing important frames and creating others as less significant.

Configuration- Firstly, using encapsulation configure physical interface and then configure IP address on the network. Once it is done, configure each physical interface.

Types of Wide Area Network and their Basic Configuration

It is used in health care process as it allows end user to access the application, services from anywhere as all resources are located centrally.

Data Link Connection Identifiers- It provides communication path from one device to another. It identifies virtual circuit at an endpoint like Telephone Company. It is used in health care setting as data transmission occurs via time multiplexed channels in which sharing occur at very high speed.

ISDN-It delivers high speed for phone lines. Integrated Services Digital Network allows access to packet-switched networks, its meets standardized in telecommunication network. It is widely used for voice calls and is used are faster alternative to dial up internet access.  

Big data technologies are offering cost effective data analysis but storage and processing of data requires overwhelming of cloud computing as cloud provides the solution (Huda, Maseleno,  Atmotiyoso, Siregar, Ahmad, Jasmi & Muhamad, 2018). Cloud based big data analytics provides innumerable services and abilities.

Signal Processing – As data is generated at high rate, the massive availability of data for analysis give rise to use cloud computing for storing the data on distributed system. In order to store the data for signal processing, a large and scalable storage space is required.

Securities Exchange Commissions using big data for monitoring the financial activities and manages the risks including enterprise risk management.

Media and Entertainment- Many on demand music or video service are offering great experience to customers by collecting millions of data and then analysing it. By providing online books to read at one stop is possible with the help of cloud.

Healthcare Providers- Healthcare uses wide amount of data which can be accessed from anywhere that avoids the chances for failure. Healthcare databases holds health-related information of patients, decision making process regarding patient is easy as records are readily available because of cloud.

Education- It is used for higher education to measure effectiveness of students as well as teachers. On the government level it is used to develop analytics of student using big data.

In the world of networking, computers are not identified by name they are recognized by numbers such as IP addresses over a network. Humans’ identifies everything with names instead of numbers. In order to bridge the communication gap between computers and humans, DNS is used. Domain name system is the way of allocating domain names and then translating into IP addresses (Borgolte, Fiebig, Hao, Kruegel & Vigna, G. 2018). It also transfers the name of the website to IP address which is needed to locate services. In addition to translate names to IP addresses it is used by mail transferring agents to find the best mail server for delivering email. It resolves the human readable names into machine language.

Cloud Computing and its use of Big Data Analytics

Purpose- It quickly provides information to end user to connect to remote hosts. DNS raises the effectiveness as server cache the most used information for certain amount of time.  DNS is disturbed worldwide and it goes with hierarchy with other servers in the network.

How DNS works?

Whenever server receives a request from user who is outside the domain range it declines by giving an authoritative issue answer. But when server receives a request from user who is in same domain it passes the request to ISP (Internet Service Provider), then ISP checks its own cache memory to find an IP address .If it finds the following IP address it sends the query to root server. Root server is at the top of DNS hierarchy. Root server doesn’t know the IP address but it knows there the IP address can be found. So it passes the query to top level domain server (TechTarget, 2018).  Top level domain server stores domain information of all top domains.  Then the recursive resolver sends the query to DNS. DNS returns the answer to recursive resolver. Finally, recursive server knows the IP address of the website and browser can retrieve the content using IP address (Verisign, 2018). 

DICOM stands for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine used for storing as well as transmitting medical images. It is widely used in hospitals by several dentists and doctors. DICOM covers a wide area of image management, image interpretation, and image procedure. It is mainly used for ultrasonography, computed tomography, radiation therapy and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) (PMC, 2018).Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine provides a mean to handle time varying data as well as stores data in separate tags (Whitcher, Schmid& Thornton, 2011).

PACS it stands for picture archiving and communication system is a technology used for economical access and storage of image from different machines. All the electronic images are converted into digital form and transmitted by PACS. It is mainly used for transmitting patient’s information on secured network. Also provides timely access to images and interpretations of related data. PASC has replaced the use of hard copies and expanded the services for remote access. It allows connections from all workstations for viewing, handing and inferring patient’s data from anywhere one secure network (Lutz, Poglitsch,  Altieri, Andreani, Aussel, Berta &Cimatti,  2011).

Key difference between DICOM and PACS is Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine is a standard that medical experts use to share radiology data between different systems made by different companies wherein PACS handle all the massive digital files such as x-rays and CAT (computerized axial tomography) scans. 

References

Huda, M., Maseleno, A., Atmotiyoso, P., Siregar, M., Ahmad, R., Jasmi, K. A., & Muhamad, N. H. N. (2018). Big Data Emerging Technology: Insights into Innovative Environment for Online Learning Resources. International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET), 13(01), 23-36.

Nobre, J. C., Mozzaquatro, B. A., & Granville, L. Z. (2018). Network-Wide Initiatives to Control Measurement Mechanisms: A Survey. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials.

Nafi, N. S., Ahmed, K., Gregory, M. A., & Datta, M. (2018). Software defined neighborhood area network for smart grid applications. Future Generation Computer Systems, 79, 500-513.

Lutz, D., Poglitsch, A., Altieri, B., Andreani, P., Aussel, H., Berta, S., &Cimatti, A. (2011).PACS Evolutionary Probe (PEP)–A Herschel Key Program. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 532, A90.

PMC, (2018), Understanding and Using DICOM, the Data Interchange Standard for Biomedical Imaging, Retrieved 1 February from <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC61235/>.

Borgolte, K., Fiebig, T., Hao, S., Kruegel, C., & Vigna, G. (2018). Cloud Strife: Mitigating the Security Risks of Domain-Validated Certificates. In Proc. Internet Society Symposium on Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS).

TechTarget, (2018) , domain name system (DNS), Retrieved 1 February from <https://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/definition/domain-name-system>.

UX Worlds, (2018) ,How the Domain Name System (DNS) Works, Retrieved 1 February from <https://www.uxworld.com/?p=384>.

Verisign, (2018), How the Domain Name System (DNS) Works, viewed 1 February, <https://www.verisign.com/en_IN/website-presence/online/how-dns-works/index.xhtml>.

Whitcher, B., Schmid, V. J., & Thornton, A. (2018).Working with the DICOM and NIfTI Data Standards in R. Journal of Statistical Software, 44(6), 1-28.