April 28, 2013
Team 5 (John Castro, Ruben Barragan, Teri Jordin, Saul Nolasco)
There are many choices to make when you are deciding how your network will communicate with each other. There are a lot of protocols to take into consideration that will help make this possible. We have decided that for our WAN protocols, we will go with using frame relay. We will explain why we have chosen to go with frame relay, but first we will explain why the other choices are did not fit our needs at ABC company. HDLC is one of the protocols that we had a hard time coming to a conclusion with. It is a very good protocol and could have done well for the ABC Company but there are a few things that come with HDLC that made us come to the final decision of why not to use it. First of all, HDLC is a type of point-to-point protocol, which means that it costs a lot more money to have. The reason why it will cost more is because this means that every different branch has to be connected to each other. Almost like in a mesh topology form and that is wasting a lot of money there. PPP is the other protocol that we had a hard time deciding whether or not we were going to use over the other two. PPP is another point-to-point protocol that networks use in order to be able to communicate with each other. As a matter of fact, PPP is an acronym for point-to-point protocol. Once again, we have decided that PPP will waste too much money because every branch will need to be connected to all the other branches in order to be able to communicate. We also came to the conclusion that PPP will not meet our technical needs because it may be too slow for the ABC Company. A feature that we did like about PPP is the fact that its error detection actually disables an interface that exceeds an error percentage threshold, allowing rerouting over better routes. (Odom, 2012) However we still came to the conclusion that it is too slow for our company. There are many reasons why we have decided to use Frame Relay over HDLC or PPP. The main reason why we wanted to use Frame Relay over the other two is the fact that it is not a point-to-point type of connection. A Frame Relay uses virtual circuits (VC) to its advantage and that is how each branch is connected. With this protocol, you do not need to connect each and every router to the other routers from the company. This is saving us a lot of money because each router can connect to all of other routers in the other branches with just a single interface. This leaves us with plenty of room for expansion because we do not have to keep connecting each router to a new branch and vice versa.
The way this works with Frame Relay is that the router is connected to a Data Communications Equipment (DCE), which are typically in the service provider’s network. We will assume that all of our branches are connected to one virtual circuit to make this much easier on us. In reality, there can be however many
