•Review and describe the most important criteria for selecting internetworking devices at the core, access, and distribution layer in a computer network • •The most important criteria for selecting internetworking devices includes; processing speed, reputation and viability of the vendor, ease of configuration, number of ports, support for security standards such as WPA or 802. 1i, ability to tune the transmit power, support for QoS features, amount of memory…etc. • • Describe the key criteria involved in selecting WAN technologies and WAN providers. Discuss which criteria is the most important from your perspective and state why. The criteria used to evaluate and select a WAN provider will vary from company to company. While cost may be the most important factor for one company, reliability may be the deciding factor for another.
Enterprises should choose a WAN provider based on the criteria that are most important to them include the extent of services and technologies offered by the provider, the geographical area covered by the provider, best network access for each application flow, maximizing application performance, continuity and network usage, takes into account the end-to-end characteristics of each available network (quality and bandwidth) to decide in real time the best access for each application flow quality parameters like network delay, jitter and loss, as well as the available bandwidth.
Evaluated in real-time, these criteria are weighted according to the type of application flow: voice will usually look for the fastest path while email may prefer the largest one.
