Assignment 5A: Western Trucking

Western Trucking operates a large fleet of trucks that deliver shipments for commercial shippers such as food stores, retailers, and wholesalers. Their main headquarters building and secondary building are shown in Figure 8.17 of your text (p. 289). They currently have a mix of shared 10base-T and switched 10base-T LANs, connected by a series of switches. They want to upgrade to a faster network. Design a new network for them, including the architecture and specific backbone and LAN technologies to be used.

Solution:

Looking at the requirements of the Western Trucking, I would go with a collapsed backbone network. This will consist of a 1.8 GH network switch and no other routers or switches. The individual LANs that are also going to be connected to the collapsed backbone architecture will be using a star topology with each computer and other network resource like printers and scanners connected to the backbone via a networking hub as can be seen in the image bellow.