Scenario

You are the leading Network Design Engineer for BEL&LO consulting, a communication networks consulting company. Your manager has assigned a hospital network project to you. The hospital has six floors with five patient rooms on each floor for a total of 30 connections. Each room needs a network connection. You are to set up a dedicated, computer addressing scheme for the patient rooms. The switch should be located centrally in the nurses station because each of the five rooms will be wired for patients to connect to an RJ45 port built into the wall of their room.

What to understand

Generally, connectivity is influenced by addressing scheme identifiers. Subnetting is an addressing scheme that enables an easy delivery of network traffic if small groups of IP addresses are designed to serve network users needs. Since hierarchies are employed when using addressing schemes, subnetting can be viewed as being hierarchical. Now;

• Let the hospitals floors represent sub-networks (so, there are 6 subnetworks)
• Let the patient connections represent host addresses. (so, there are 5 hosts per floor)
• Let the switch represents an intermediary device processing data between addressed devices. (so, there is one switch per floor).

Task:

• Devise a physical topology (show the arrangement of network components) and logical network topology (derive the subnet masks scheme and IP addresses) for only one of the six floors.
  • Use the Packet Tracer software to create and show the physical and logical network topology. Use the network IP address: 192.168.1.0, indicate the IP address for each room and the subnet mask scheme for this network. Show the router and switch and indicate the default gateway address. (Hint: use the network IP address given to derive a subnet mask that will allow 5 hosts)
• How would you change the subnet addressing scheme you used in 1) to add an additional network connection to the hospital rooms to have a total of 10 connections per floor or 2 ports per room? (Hint: What subnet mask scheme will allow at least 10 hosts and future expansion of the network?)
• Explain scenarios where unicasts, multicasts, and broadcasts addresses could be used. (Hint: consider how a patient in Room 1 and 2, Room 1 and all patients on floor 1 etc. will communicate).

Post

• Packet tracer model with an explanation of your physical topology, logical topology (i..e., initially proposed subnet mask, newly proposed subnet mask for expansion), how addressing types can be used and answers to all other questions.

.... I forgot how to network :....(