A RESILIENT MULTICAST NETWORK WITH HIGH AVAILABILITY AND MONITORING SYSTEM (MANAGEMENT PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS)
ABSTRACT
Most of the companies in Nigeria including the banking industries offers their new staff basic training and send other staff on developing training and programs. The Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN absorb large number of fresh graduate every years plus the number of existing staff, the bank spend huge amount moving its staff for training; by so doing the bank will improve, strengthen and empower their working force. Due to cost and risk involved in transporting staff around the branches, the company’s board of directors has decided to adopt the use of video communication that could support either real-life streaming or recorded formats to be deployed on the company’s existing network. Due to the nature of the resources that would be transmitted on the network, the company is looking into having the network designed as a resilient network.
In this project, an IP multicast network prototype is designed to offer the bank a multicast system with efficient high availability and a monitoring station which is cost-efficient and mitigate the risk involve in transporting staff around the nation. The project consists of researches made to determine the best approaches to implement load balancing, fail-over in a multicast network. The research areas include IP multicast protocols, load balancing techniques, video/audio codecs, network management protocols and monitoring tools. The research findings were used in building an artefact to illustrate the multicast network between the companies; Abuja branch to the Lagos branch. The prototype was built to meet the company’s requirements – multicast network with adequate load balancing and fail-over with a monitoring station.
In order to verify the functionalities of the artefact produced, numbers of laboratory test were carried out. The entire test carried out shows that all the implemented protocols and techniques are working as expected. Also, the protocol implemented to provide the network with high availability was ensured by creating a backup link in case of any failure and efficient load distribution. And multicast traffic is monitored by implementing a monitoring tool with adequate network security incorporated, in the entire system by introducing Virtual Private Network technology (VPN) and Simple Network Protocol (SNMP).
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 PROJECT OVERVIEW
The rapid increase in the use multimedia and computer-based technique, sophisticated multimedia application such as live video streaming have been found as major traffic on the Internet. The traditional use of one-to-one communication is supported by TCP/IP protocol is no longer suitable for these applications. For the past years, there has been increased interest in researching on multicast services which support one-to-many communication (Cha, Ahn et al. 2001). Multicast service are capable of supporting multimedia application such as video/audio on-demand, teleconferencing and it also offer efficient use of Internet resources (such as bandwidth). In multicasting, data packets are sent from one source to different receivers by sharing the network bandwidth available, this is achieved by sending just one copy of the packet.
When deploying a multicast network to handle multimedia applications or real-time traffic, there is every need to provide efficient and adequate delivery which makes is necessary to investigate the technologies and protocol that will provide a secure, reliable and high availability multicast system. In order to achieve a reliable multicast network, there should be need to eliminate any point of failure; by so doing the network could deliver at higher availability rate.
