Assignment: Data communications

A. Encoding and decoding signals

Note: Hand drawn plots will get 0 marks. You need to embed screenshots of your plots and include the links generated by sharing your solution from the Desmos online graph plotting tool (as introduced in the lab and available at: https://www.desmos.com/calculator). Since group work is not permitted, we expect each student to submit a different link! You can access your individualised assignment parameters on Moodle.

1. Modulation - Analog signals

You need to download your individualized assignment parameters from Moodle. They contain two sets of encoding tables and encoded signals, A and B. For each of these, do the following:

a) Identify the type of encoding (FM, AM, PM, or combinations of these) and the size (in bits) of each symbol in the encoding.
b) Draw the constellation diagram for the encoding (except if the encoding is FM).
c) Draw the wave form for each symbol.
d) Demodulate the given signal (i.e., give the bit sequence that it represents).

2. Digital encoding

The bit sequence C needs to be transmitted as a digital signal. Design an encoding, state the encoding rules (as a table), and plot the digital signal for the encoding schemes below.

a) bipolar non return to zero inverted (NRZI)
b) Manchester encoding

B. Technical Report

Based on the scenario you find below, you are to write a technical report for the senior executive of the company you work in, evaluating different technologies to meet the company's networking requirements.

The rest of this specification is organised into two parts: 1) the scenario, which explains the situation of the (imaginary) company you work for, and 2) the instructions how you should approach this task.

1. Scenario

Your role / company overview: You work in the IT department of DataAnalytics.AU, a start-up company that was spun out of Monash University with around 20 employees in Melbourne. The company is offering data analysis services, where customers can upload large data sets and access customised visual analyses through a web site.

Your company is growing fast, and the plan is to move into new offices within the next few months. You were hired as a user interface specialist, but when the CIO (Chief Information Officer) found out that you did FIT9135 as part of your Master's degree, she gave you the task to design the network infrastructure for the new offices.

Network requirements:

1. Up to now, the company was operating its own web server in a Monash data centre. The projected growth in customers and staff means that a dedicated, more powerful server will be required. The company is considering hosting its own servers or paying for an "on- demand computing platform" such as Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean, Linode etc.

2. The new office space is located in an old warehouse, and you need to decide what kind of local network infrastructure should be installed. In addition to potentially supporting the company servers, the local network infrastructure needs to support a dynamic work environment, where staff don't have assigned offices but move around with their laptops to work in small groups.

3. The new office space needs to be connected to the Internet.

Your task:

For the first requirement, your task is to do some research on the advantages and disadvantages of hosting your own server versus using online services. The second and third requirements are linked to the first one. If the company decides to host their own servers, that may have an impact on the required local network infrastructure and Internet connection.

Research and analysis expected in the report:

• The CIO wants to be informed about the options at a technical level. However, they expect you to give them enough arguments to also convince their investors, in particular with respect to costs and benefits of any new technology.

• Go into some technical detail to explain differences between technologies. It will be useful to create tables for some of the comparisons.

You can answer questions such as

o What devices are involved in each option and what are their functions?

o How does hosting your own servers compare to online platforms in terms of scalability, reliability, and up-front versus long-term costs?

o What kind of (wired and wireless) network technology should be installed in the new office space in order to facilitate the mobility of the staff?

o What are the available upstream and downstream capacities of different Internet providers? Is the technology scalable and future-proof, i.e., can we buy more capacity later without investing in expensive new hardware?

2. Instructions

Writing reports is an essential aspect of any IT career. You will be expected to deliver reports that are accurate and factual, that provide evidence for your findings, and that look professional.

Before you start

Before starting to write, think about your audience, i.e., who is reading the report? Don't write for your tutors. Write for your CIO and his team!

Carefully read the marking rubric on Moodle (FIT9135 Assignment 1, Part 2, Marking Rubric pdf file) to find out what we expect you to write for the different grades.

Sources and referencing

Any claims or recommendations that you make should be substantiated with supporting references. That means that you cannot just claim that A is better than B, you have to argue why that is the case and point to external sources that can serve as evidence.

You can use the unit's textbook and other standard literature as sources, but you will also need to use additional documentation to find all the technical information and commercial details for this report.

Whenever you use material from an external source, make sure that you reference that source. You also need to assess the quality and reliability of the source - e.g., a company might say that their product is better than the competition's, but you cannot easily trust them. An independent expert review of different technologies is much more trustworthy.