The internet uses a network technology called TCP/IP. The name comes from the protocol stack that includes TCP protocol in the transport layer and IP protocol in the network layer. Sometimes UDP protocol is used in the Transport layer instead of TCP.
In many organisations there is a knowledge gap in senior management. For this assignment you have been asked to give a review of TCP/IP to explain the technology to senior managers to assist them with make decisions on major network upgrades that the company is about to carry out. This will require both a technical description of the protocols and a description on how these protocols enable business applications to work.
Requirements
The structure of your document is up to you but you should address each of the following requirements. There will be marks applied to each requirement in roughly equal portions.
1. Write your document as a business report. Structure your sections as you think but cover the following requirements.
2. You should research the topics that you describe in this report in an academic manner. This means that you should do your research and keep a list of the references where you got your information. You might want to add some notes about these references for your own workflow needs. This is sometimes called an annotated bibliography. Once you feel that you have learnt about the technologies sufficiently to start writing about them in your own words then you should put your references to one side and just write from your memories of your research. Once you have written a first draft you can check back against your references to see if there are important pieces of information that you are missing. You can also begin to place the in text references so that your work is correctly stating where you got the ideas for each idea. Generally one paragraph will cover one idea so you should have a reference for each paragraph apart from paragraphs that are just introducing a topic and not stating any facts. If you just write your paper as you do your research you will find that it will not mark as highly because it will not have any natural flow and your writing is likely to just be what you have read with minor changes to the words used in each sentence and this will read like a story that has been written by many different authors. It will also like be in too much technical detail without the necessary higher level descriptions for a non technical
person to be able to understand.
3. Technology description of TCP, UDP and I IP. Describe what they are and basically how they
do their work. As this report is targeted at senior managers with little technical knowledge, any terminology that you use should be defined. Your use of technical language should explain the technology so that a non technical person can understand it. It does still need to describe the protocols in a reasonable amount of depth and as such a single sentence to describe IP for example as "a protocol that gives addresses to all computers on the internet and direct messages on the internet to the correct computer " is far too brief and lacking detail. You should explain for example the format of a datagram. What the main fields in the header are for and how they are used by the protocol. You will need to work from a simple high level description to a more detailed description for it to be able to be understood by non-technical users. You should also describe the layered model briefly in introducing TCP, UDP and IP.
4. DHCP is a technology that is used to provide IP address configuration to user's computers.
Management would be interested to understand this technology more. They are interested in how it can be used to allow authorized users to access their network either via wireless or wired Ethernet but also to block users who do are not on a list of authorized users. There are several different ways this can be done. Please describe a solution to this problem
5. Provide a description of business applications that rely on these protocols and how the protocols help to make these applications work. You should focus on the differences for example between TCP and UDP, connection versus connectionless, reliable delivery versus
applications that require real time delivery of data, etc.