I have been working on an independent study to revamp the telecom lab here at RIT.  The telecom labs has lots of cool equipment such as Cisco ONS optical transport gear, Fiber to the home PON equipment, T1/T3 multiplexers, hybrid fiber coax equipment, and class 5 central office switches.  Most of the lab hardware is time division multiplexed (TDM) based, but in today telecom environment everything is going IP.  The lab’s TDM based hardware does a great job of emulation a central office network, but the IP network in the lab is more like a home network than an ISP.  For my independent study I am changing this by re-designing the lab IP network to implement BGP and MPLS.

A great tool for working with Cisco IP based networks is GSN3.  GNS3 is a GUI based Cisco router emulation tool.  Designing and building networks in emulation is far easier and a massive time saver.  Instead of ripping the lab apart and running new cables all over the place, all I have to do is build a virtual lab.  Once I build a virtual lab and configure all the routers successfully, I can copy the configurations over to the real routers in the lab and know that the network will work correctly.  There is minimal downtime since I can keep the existing network up and only deploy the new network once I have verified everything is working.  GNS3 is also great for studying for Cisco certifications since you can configure and setup a network in a fraction compared with the actual hardware.  To learn more about GNS3 visit the official website: http://www.gns3.net/

To receive my master’s degree from RIT, I must either complete a project or a thesis.  I have decided to go the project route as this will allow me some extra credit hours to work on an independent study implementing a MPLS backbone in the lab.  After careful consideration of a variety of topics that I find interesting, I have decided to investigate the issue of limited spectrum for the wireless telecommunications industry.  Specifically I will be researching and writing about the use of femtocells in expanding the coverage, capacity, and speed of wireless provider’s networks.  Femtocells are miniature cell sites targeted for homes and small businesses where existing cellular coverage is lacking.  These devices could drastically change how wireless providers operate their networks and this is what I will be investigating in my master’s project.

Femtocell Project Outline & Proposal