ABSTRACT:
The use of Information Technology for educational processes in the 4th industrial revolution currently places demand on security, speed performance, and effective service delivery. Most Campus Wide Data Center Networks (CW-DCNs) suffer from the above perspectives. Cases of traffic congestions caused by unbalanced traffic distributions and security vulnerabilities are obvious. Nevertheless, it is difficult to address these challenges with the existent Ethernet-based (IEEE 802.11) DCN architecture. This paper proposes services convergence with CW-DCN as a viable alternative with a high potential to tackle the above problem dimensions due to its flexibility, scalability and reliability. The work presents a WiMax based Data Center Network (WiMax-DCN) that offers secure and optimal service delivery in Nigerian Universities. More specifically, the design focused on a comprehensive secured server scheduling mechanism using IBM Flex manager and Cisco Stateful Packet Inspection Firewall (CSPIF). In the design, two different optimization objectives were considered, with one targeting the unbalanced traffic distribution in legacy WLANs and one maximizing the total network Quality of Service (QoS) under the constraints of limited wireless resources. Discrete event multithreading Riverbed Modeller 17.5 was used as a heuristic tool for the two problems. This was used to carry out extensive simulation study for validating the system architecture. The results demonstrate that WiMax-DCN offers improved performance over WLAN based DCN. Consequently, this work therefore recommends WiMax-DCN (with supports for backward compatibility) to Nigerian tertiary institutions for enhanced security, cost effectiveness, and optimal service delivery.
Keywords: Campus Networks, Services Convergence, Security Vulnerabilities, QoS, WiMax-DCN, Riverbed Modeller
