WAN Design Methodologies
WAN design methodologies should be used when designing enterprise edge networks. Some keys to WAN design are the following processes:
Identifying the network requirements: This includes reviewing the types of applications, the traffic volume, and the traffic patterns in the network.
Assessing the existing network: This involves reviewing the technologies used and the locations of hosts, servers, network equipment, and other end nodes.
Designing the topology: This is based on the availability of technology as well as the projected traffic patterns, technology performance, constraints, and reliability.
When designing the WAN topology, remember that the design should describe the functions that the enterprise modules should perform. The expected service levels provided by each WAN technology should be explained. WAN connections can be characterized by the cost of renting the transmission media from the service provider to connect two or more sites.
New network designs should be flexible and adaptable to future technologies and should not limit the customer’s options going forward. For example, collaboration applications such as VoIP and video are common now, and most enterprise network designs should be able to support them. The customer should not have to undergo major hardware upgrades to implement these types of technologies. The ongoing support and management of the network are other important factors, and the design’s cost-effectiveness is important as well.
Table 9-2 lists key design principles that can help serve as the basis for developing network designs.
Table 9-2 Key Design Principles
Design Principle |
Description |
|---|---|
High availability |
Redundancy through hardware, software, and connectivity |
Scalability |
Modularity with additional devices, services, and technologies |
Security |
Measures to protect business data |
Performance |
Enough capacity and bandwidth for applications |
Manageability |
Ease of managing and maintaining the infrastructure |
Standards and regulations |
Compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and standards |
Cost |
Appropriate security and technologies given the budget |
High availability is what most businesses and organizations strive for in sound network designs. The key components of application availability are response time, throughput, and reliability. Real-time applications such as voice and video are not very tolerant of jitter and delay.
Table 9-3 identifies various application requirements for data, voice, and video traffic.
Table 9-3 Application Requirements for Data, Voice, and Video Traffic
Characteristic |
Data File Transfer |
Interactive Data Application |
Real-Time Voice |
Real-Time Video |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Response time |
Reasonable |
Within a second |
One-way delay less than 150 ms with low delay and jitter |
Minimum delay and jitter |
Throughput and packet loss tolerance |
High/medium |
Low/low |
Low/low |
High/medium |
Downtime (high reliability = low downtime) |
Reasonable |
Low |
Low |
Minimum |
Response Time
Response time is a measure of the time between a client user request and a response from the server host. An end user will be satisfied with a certain level of delay in response time. However, there is a limit to how long the user will wait. This amount of time can be measured and serves as a basis for future application response times. Users perceive the network communication in terms of how quickly the server returns the requested information and how fast the screen updates. Some applications, such as a request for an HTML web page, require short response times. On the other hand, a large FTP transfer might take awhile, but this is generally acceptable.
Throughput
In network communications, throughput is a measure of data transferred from one host to another in a given amount of time. Bandwidth-intensive applications have a greater impact on a network’s throughput than does interactive traffic such as a Telnet session. Most high-throughput applications involve some type of file-transfer activity. Because throughput-intensive applications have longer response times, you can usually schedule them when time-sensitive traffic volumes are lower, such as after hours.
Reliability
Reliability is a measure of a given application’s availability to its users. Some organizations require rock-solid application reliability, such as five nines (99.999%); this level of reliability has a higher price than most other applications. For example, financial and security exchange commissions require nearly 100% uptime for their applications. These types of networks are built with a large amount of physical and logical redundancy. It is important to ascertain the level of reliability needed for a network that you are designing. Reliability goes further than availability by measuring not only whether the service is there but whether it is performing as it should.
Bandwidth Considerations
Table 9-4 compares several WAN technologies in terms of speeds and media types.
Table 9-4 Physical Bandwidth Comparison
WAN Connectivity |
Bandwidth: Up to 100 Mbps |
Bandwidth: 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps |
|---|---|---|
Copper |
Fast Ethernet |
Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet |
Fiber |
Fast Ethernet |
Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, SONET/SDH, dark fiber |
Wireless LTE/5G |
802.11a/g LTE/LTE Advanced |
802.11n/ac Wave1/Wave2 LTE Advance Pro/5G |
A WAN designer must engineer the network with enough bandwidth to support the needs of the users and applications that will use the network. How much bandwidth a network needs depends on the services and applications that will require network bandwidth. For example, VoIP requires more bandwidth than interactive Secure Shell (SSH) traffic. A large number of graphics or CAD drawings require an extensive amount of bandwidth compared to file or print sharing information being transferred on the network. A big driver in increasing demand for bandwidth is the expanded use of collaboration applications that utilize video interactively.
When designing bandwidth for a WAN, remember that implementation and recurring costs are important factors. It is best to begin planning for WAN capacity early. When the link utilization reaches around 50% to 60%, you should consider increases and closely monitor the capacity. When the link utilization reaches around 75%, immediate attention is required to avoid congestion problems and packet loss that will occur when the utilization nears full capacity.
QoS techniques become increasingly important when delay-sensitive traffic such as VoIP is using the limited bandwidth available on the WAN. LAN bandwidth, on the other hand, is generally inexpensive and plentiful; in the age of robust real-time applications, however, QoS can be necessary. To provide connectivity on the LAN, you typically need to be concerned only with hardware and implementation costs.