MN503 OVERVIEW OF INTERNETWORKING PRICELO MALLS

You are employed as a Network Engineer by a leading shopping mall Mega company called PriceLo malls Inc. The company has branches of their malls spread in 5 major cities of Australia- Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Gold Coast. Each of these cities on an average has 10 PriceLo malls. Furthermore, PriceLo malls are also in USA, South Asia and Canada. You are required to design a network from scratch for their recently constructed PriceLo Mall branch in North Melbourne, The network coverage should be there for both wired and wireless network inside the mall. The mall in North Melbourne has 4 floors with 3 food courts. Each food court can accommodate up to a maximum of 500 customers.

PriceLo mall expects to have 4000 customers in their North Melbourne Mega mall and 500 staff. The 500 staff will be employed in the 5 departments of the North Melbourne mall namely IT- 70 staff, Human Resources- 50 staff, Sales- 100, Engineering-80 staff and

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Security-200 staff. Each of these departments should be on a different subnet for confidentiality of information transfer.

The customers are technology savvy and want to be able to use their laptops or iPad or any other communication gadget on either the wireless or wired network available within the mall. For the wired network the mall proposes to have connection ports available on the tables of the food court area where the customers can sit down and enjoy food as well as get connected to the wired or wireless network. The speed of the connection offered to the customers needs to be based on the amount of money the customers have spent on their purchase in the mall. The management has currently planned for three speeds – 100kb/s – 400 kb/s if no purchases are made, 1 Mbps if purchase of over 10 $ are made and speed of 3-5 Mbps if purchase of above 40$ is made.

A challenge is finding the right solutions to best facilitate ease of deployment and limit disruption of service whenever the network needs to be upgraded.

In addition to the obvious hazards of having anyone and any communication gadget connect to the network, another big issue is being able to capture important information about the network users accessing the campus network.  For example, it is important to identify users who might be doing something inappropriate using network resources.  All customers before they start using the PriceLo malls network are required to accept the terms and conditions of the network usage policy of the mall.  If someone violates a policy, such as downloading inappropriate material, the IT team needs a way to identify the customer location in the mall, so that they can be fined by the malls security personnel.

Authentication of the genuine customers of the mall is also necessary before they can use the malls wired or wireless network.  A method for a secure authentication mechanism for approved users and devices attempting to connect to the network is another key challenge.

As part of the wireless network deployment you need to also to find out how to provide hotspots in the mall by using a suitable Wireless LAN technology by taking into consideration the RF propagation characteristics. Some of the hotspots are to provide Open access authentication while others need to provide shared key authentication to customers who pay a fee.

LoPrice mall is on a tight schedule and budget so you need to quickly create a detailed design of the network for their North Melbourne mall. PriceLo malls business productivity is very important so it also wants to make sure that the network downtime is not more than 0.04%.

PriceLo malls will provides online training over the Internet to its staff within Australia from its headquarters based in Sydney and all the training material will be made available online on its webservers. As the training material is very confidential in nature so the webservers need to be provided with a secure or a protected network. The North Melbourne mall of PriceLo also wants to have desktop screen sharing and online meeting facility which will allow the staff in different branches to securely collaborate to develop, deliver and improve the customer quality in its malls. This will reduce time and money spent in quick sharing of ideas and IT technology and the cost of travelling. In particular each branch office will have high quality digital video conferencing systems and secure remote desktop sharing facilities with a WAN to support it.

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Another key challenge is to create the above required network with as low cost as possible but it should still be as per the principles of the top down network design.

Note: You will  need to undertake a serious literature research on the networking equipment vendors, cost of their equipment that you plan to purchase, network security considerations, top down design, testing methods and any issues that may arise. You are allowed to make assumptions for the network design as long as you can justify them.

 

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