Abstract

This paper presents the results of a practical implementation of the hierarchical network design. The aim of this paper is to briefly show the effect of hierarchy in a campus network by taking the case study of a University network that has no hierarchy implemented. We simulated the original network and subjected the network to run for a period of 30 min with all the deployed services fully running to obtain the values of our determining metric (HTTP page response time). We then implemented the hierarchy into the network and carried out the same test to get new values which were finally compared and we recorded a reduction in the HTTP page response time. We were able to show how the network hierarchy affects the download time and a simple way of integrating hierarchy into an already existing network.

Key words: Networking, local area network, campus area network, small campus design.