Towards a Fault-Tolerant and Scalable Network Infrastructure Design for an Educational Institution in Marinduque Island, Philippines

This study aims to design a fault-tolerant and scalable network infrastructure for an educational institution on Marinduque Island, Philippines. As the institution's facilities and campus grew, so did its program offerings; in 1996, the school began providing college courses. The college offers undergraduate programs in Elementary and Secondary Education, Computer Science, and Information Technology. The college also provides the Senior High School (SHS) program, specifically the Academic and Technical-Vocational-Livelihood (TVL) Tracks. The campus requires network architecture enhancements and upgrades. The critical demand is to connect all the buildings on the campus for protected file and application sharing for personnel and students. Campus buildings comprise offices, classrooms, and computer laboratories. The proposed design employs a building block approach, a hierarchical network design model, and the TIA-EIA structured cabling standards. The link redundancy, failure domain size reduction, link aggregation, access layer expansion, and routing protocol tuning were all part of the design to ensure fault-tolerant and scalability. The design principles were efficaciously adopted and integrated. The network design architecture operated successfully during the test validation (using ping, tracert, and traceroute utility commands). Finally, all offices and laboratory workstations have successfully connected to the servers for authentication.