Australian Network Design Practice

Abstract

The network infrastructure in many organizations is now vital to their continuing success and survival. This increased dependence has been fuelled by various factors including new high-speed network technologies and the acceptance of client/server application design techniques. Interestingly, though, there is little published information on network design methodologies that could be used for ensuring that the network design is aligned with the organization's network goals and that key design tasks are not overlooked. As the first stage in the development of a network design methodology framework, this research investigates what issues derived from the literature are seen by network design practitioners as important and what are the current tasks performed by practitioners in network design. Based on this research the outline of a generic network design methodology is presented.