Unit 4 Physical Topology

Unit 4 Research Lab Topology

Timothy Justice

IT273-02

Prof: Nelson Stewart

8/28/2012

a. The bus physical topology consists of a single cable that connects all nodes on a network without intervening connectivity devices.

b. A(n) serial backbone is the simplest kind of backbone.

c. Fast Ethernet operates at 100-Mbps

d Switching is a component of a network’s logical topology that determines how connections are created between nodes.

e. One thing all Ethernet networks have in common is their access method, known as CSMA/CD.

The research lab physical topology I suggest is the star topology (Figure 1), because of the ease of scalability available in this topology. Also because this is a smaller scale network with only 7 workstations we are using a peer to peer network. With this size and style of network you should not need a network administrator. The two rooms are not over 100 meters in distance so we will not need any repeaters in this network. My backbone medium will be twisted pair copper cable. Due to the size and speed requirements we can go with a 100Base-T technology which again supports the star topology and wiring distances at this company.

Due to security issues it is best to avoid any wireless access to the network. With other topologies the entire network can become dysfunctional by a single node/component failure in the star topology; a cabling issue can affect only two nodes at most. Due to high fault tolerance it is preferable to use this topology. Another useful quality of this layout is the central hub/switch making it simple for all employees to access the printer from their specific workstation. No need to connect physically to the printer from their computer. I also suggest for this network a file server for backup storage of the lab experiments and research done daily, building redundancy into the system. All 7 of the workstations will have internet access for research materials. All of the individual workstations will need to run...