You have been hired as a network designer to design a network for Acme Limited, a medium-sized Engineering Company. They have provided you with the specifications below and asked you to design the network in full.
The corporate network consists of three offices, in Dublin, Cork and Galway. There is also a remote site located in Donegal, which should be connected to the corporate site through a VPN.

Detail of problems

•    You are required to design all aspects of the network, including cabling, network diagrams, hub/switch/router locations and configurations, IP Addressing scheme, subnetting, routing protocols and configurations, redundancy, scalability, security, LANs, WANs, WLANs, VLANs, VPNs and DMZ.

•    Your design should be done to best practice and should be logical, efficient, practical, scalable and secure.

Deliverables:

•    Research paper of approximately 4,500-5,000 words, discussing your research into network design and describe and justifying your own network design.

•    Network diagrams mapping in detail the entire network.

Structured report containing research. Sources of information MUST be referenced. Your report should also include your network topology diagrams. The report MUST be formatted according to the IEEE authoring style guidelines for conference papers. A copy of the guidelines is available at: http://www.cms.livjm.ac.uk/iwna5/authoringtemplate.pdf.

There is no strict word limit but the report would be expected to be in the region of 4,500-5000 words, including references.