In this Discussion, you will evaluate the needs of several different service types, and explain what transmission characteristics each requires, prefers, or is indifferent towards. Depending on the nature of your user base, this may produce conflicts between the special needs of one application and the needs of a simpler, but larger volume application. This may not always be evident, but some techniques can improve both. Sometimes, however, there may be no way to coax more performance from a given situation. A network manager needs to tell the difference, try to predict unavoidable congestion, and make recommendations on how (or whether) it can be alleviated.

Describe, and critique, one application with regard to its transmission requirements, such as bandwidth, latency, reliable delivery, in-sequence delivery, and jitter. Example applications include:

Stored unicast video

Stored multicast video

Live unicast video

Live multicast video

Live 2-way video phone

Live multi-way video phone

Bulk file transfer (FTP, HTTP download)

Remote desktop (Microsoft RDC, VNC)

Bittorrent

Infrastructure traffic (DNS, DHCP, routing protocols, router hot spare protocol, inter-server heartbeat for clusters)

Client-server database

Storage Area Network (SAN) connections (iSCSI)

SNMP or other management protocols

Choose an application, and evaluate its needs for these requirements.

Propose a way of provisioning an Enterprise LAN so that this application gets the best performance. Do you see areas of possible conflict? Can you think of other parameters to be considered along with the ones mentioned above? These could be any resource or constraint that would affect the behavior of the network.