Network Design And Analysis For M2M Solutions Essay.

Network Design for M2M Solutions

Having a good network for an organization enables proper communication and smooth function of the activities of the organization. M2M Solutions is a medium sized organization. The company has six sites across Sydney such that it has various departments running in these six buildings. The company is planning to have a good network design so that the communication among the various departments is smooth and the information stored is safe from outside access. Each building is to be enabled with a router to form a network. The company is looking for a new network design such that each building has its own single subnet. The network is designed with class A address and network analyzer for analyzing, monitoring and for troubleshooting is recommended for the network of the organization.

The six buildings and the number of workstations in each building are given below:

• Finance Office - 260 workstations
• Transport Office - 130 workstations
• Research Office - 120 workstations
• Sales Office - 40 workstations
• Information technology - 520 workstations
• Head Office - 60 workstations

Thus, in total there are 1200 workstations.

The company is making use of a private IP address with IP as 10.0.0.0 for the entire network. Each building shall have a router to connect to the network such that each building shall have its own single subnet. Currently, the company has 1200 workstations and it is expected that in near future the number of workstations may increase. Keeping expansion in the network in mind the following addressing scheme using the 10.0.0.0 IP address for the six sites is given below:

The Building is making use of Class A private addressing scheme. For Class A the mask address must begin with 255.0.0.0 at the minimum as the first octet of the IP address which defines the location on the network must be used to define the network portion of the device. These network portions are used by the routers to send packets to the network (Sunshine, 2013). Routers don’t need any host address all they need is the network portion or the host’s address which defines where the host is located and the MAC address which is used to find the host on the network. The last three octets of this IP address mask are then used to represent the address of the hosts on a network LAN. Keeping all these points in the mind following addressing scheme is proposed for the network.

The first building is the finance office and it has 260 work stations.

Since the number of workstations is more than 254 then following addressing is used for the finance office then 10.0.0.0/23 shall have [2^ (9) - 2] = 510 hosts (Hui et al, 2014). But the information office has 520 hosts thus 10.0.0.0/22 should be used for addressing as this shall accommodate 1022 hosts.  But the company is expecting approximately 1200 workstation across all the sites thus; subnetting should be done as 10.0.0.0/21 giving the ability to have 2046 hosts.

Addressing Scheme

Currently, the company has 1010 hosts and in such scenario 10.0.0.22 is the best option. Thus, the chosen addressing scheme is as follows:

The network diagram for the organization is given below:

Figure 1: Network Diagram

Each building has a router which routes the packets to and fro to the network and thus establishes the communication among the various sites of the organization.

The number of hosts supported by the company with 10.0.0.0/22 IP address is [2^ (11) - 2] = 1022 hosts. Thus, currently, the company can support 1022 hosts per building. If the number of hosts per network jumps to over 1,024 per building, then there is a need to change the network address from 10.0.0.0/22 to 10.0.0.0/21 so as to scale the network to accommodate at the maximum 2046 hosts as then the number of hosts is  [2^ (11) - 2] = 2046 hosts. Thus the new subnetting for the buildings can be Finance Office - 10.0.0.0/21, Transport Office – 10.0.4.0/21, Research Office - 10.0.8.0/21, Sales Office - 10.0.12.0/21,Information technology – 10.0.16.0/21 and Head Office - 10.0.20.0/21.

When the network size grows it becomes difficult for the network administrator to monitor and trouble shoots the problems associated with the network. Manually going and finding the fault within the network, diagnosing the fault and then trouble shooting it takes a lot of time and till then the network may not be available for the usage. Thus, there are some tools like network analyzers which assist the network administrator to perform such networking monitoring, analyzing and troubleshooting tasks easily and efficiently. Network analyzers are also known as a packet sniffer and these are tools which help the network administrator to monitor the network of the organization, to perform the diagnostic tests of the entire network and troubleshoot the problems of the network (Ndatinya et al 2015).

Network analysis is a process performed by the network administrator where the network traffic is captured and inspected closely so as to determine what is happening in the network. There are two techniques of network monitoring namely router based monitoring and non-router based monitoring techniques. The monitoring facilities built-into the routers and require no additional hardware or software installation is known as the router based techniques. In non-router based techniques need additional hardware and software (Ndatinya et al 2015).

Generally, in a network, the communication takes place through the networking protocols like OSI model and the TCP/IP model. The internet based network generally makes use of TCP/IP model and in this model, the data is broken down in the forms of packets and sent to the destination address. Each host on the network has an IP address. The packet's header comprise of the destination address and the source address. The packet is forwarded to the destination address via packet-switched networks. These packets then are reassembled at the destination end and the message is delivered to the end user.  In general computer network without the packet sniffer, the host computer looks only at the packet addressed to it and ignores the rest of the packets on the network. But when the packets sniffer or the network analyzer is used the network analyzer sets itself to the promiscuous mode and looks for everything coming on to the network. It even captures the raw data packets and analyzes the packet (Gandhi et al, 2014).

While dealing with any network issue the network administrator executes the steps employed as standard steps of trouble shooting like identifying the sources of the problem and take necessary corrections. Some of the methods employed are performing Ping, checking client devices, IP addresses, etc. but these methods fail to deal with complex network problems and here the network analyzer come to play. It captures the packets and displays the details related to the packet along with the protocol options and the data payload. This information gives the details of what is going on in the entire network and gives quick details to the network administrator for fast trouble shooting (Gandhi et al, 2014).

1. Real time network card utilization: through this tool the network administrator gets information on the bandwidth utilization of the entire network. This enables spot packet burst and other traffic patterns (Gandhi et al, 2014).
2. The traffic captured using the network analyzer is generally stored in a buffer space. This buffer can be stored in the hard disk and can be analyzed later for the network monitoring tools.
3. There are some configuration problems which are difficult to identify by the network administrator. The network analyzer helps on automatically identifying the network problem and thus allows uncovering any suspicious activities on the network or any hacking attempts on the network by any unauthorized user.
4. When connected to ISP the network analyzer can give details on the type of website visited, what was searched, whom the email was sent to, what is downloaded etc (Gandhi et al, 2014).

1. Wire shark: This is a freely available network analyzer tool which is capable of inspecting traffic, identifying denial-of–services attacks, analyze the packets, and troubleshoot the devices and firewalls. It also analyzes the protocol analyzer (Ndatinya et al 2015).
2. Microsoft Network monitor: this is a deprecated packet analyzer which captures, view and analyzes the network data and deciphers the network protocols. This is used for troubleshooting network problems and thus can be used for rectifying the network based issues (Gandhi et al, 2014).
3. Cpasa: This is a network analyzer that is capable of capturing the packets from multiple and single adapters, analyze the contents of each packet, provides statistics related to the IP addresses and the MAC address, analyses the protocols from data link and application layer, give logs of web browsing, email, computer anomalies to the user. IT alerts the network administrator regarding any type of anomalies coming to the network. This is a paid network analyzing tool and the cost is $0-$995, depending on version (Varanasi et al, 2016).

It is better to go for Wire shark as the network analyzing tool as it is freely available and gives proper network analysis and monitoring capabilities. It also provides details regarding the packets, their IP address, and MAC address and can thus be used easily for troubleshooting. The GUI of the Wire shark is user-friendly and easy to use (Ndatinya et al 2015).

References

Hui, J. W. Y., Turon, M. A., & Woodyatt, J. H. (2016). U.S. Patent No. 9,300,581. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Sunshine, C. A. (Ed.). (2013). Computer Network Architectures and Protocols. Springer Science & Business Media.

Gandhi, C., Suri, G., Golyan, R. P., Saxena, P., & Saxena, B. K. (2014). Packet Sniffer–A Comparative Study. International Journal of Computer Networks and Communications Security, 2(5), 179-187.

Varanasi, A., & Swathi, P. (2016). Comparative Study of Packet Sniffing tools for HTTP Network Monitoring and Analyzing. International Journal of Science, Engineering and Computer Technology, 6(12), 406.

Ndatinya, V., Xiao, Z., Manepalli, V. R., Meng, K., & Xiao, Y. (2015). Network forensics analysis using Wireshark. International Journal of Security and Networks, 10(2), 91-106.