Introduction
Huffman Trucking is a national transportation company with 1,400 employees. The company operates logistical hubs in Los Angeles, California; St. Louis, Missouri; and Bayonne, New Jersey; and a central maintenance facility in Cleveland, Ohio. The company’s mission is to be a profitable, growing, adaptive company in an intensively competitive logistical services business environment which includes being the industry leader in leveraging technology to the maximum to provide customer service and business efficiencies. (Huffman, 2005) Currently, each location consists of both an office and a plant. A local area network is used at all the location. A local area network (LAN) supplies networking capability to a group of computers in close proximity to each other such as in an office building, a school, or a home. A LAN is useful for sharing resources like files, printers, games or other applications. A LAN in turn often connects to other LANs, and to the Internet or other WAN. (LAN, 2008) This paper will examine the local area networks at Huffman Trucking and provide a recommendation for upgrades to the current systems.
In information technology and on the Internet, infrastructure is the physical hardware used to interconnect computers and users. Infrastructure includes the transmission media, including telephone lines, cable television lines, and satellites and antennas, and also the routers, aggregators, repeaters, and other devices that control transmission paths. Infrastructure also includes the software used to send, receive, and manage the signals that are transmitted. In some usages, infrastructure refers to interconnecting hardware and software and not to computers and other devices that are interconnected. However, to some information technology users, infrastructure is viewed as everything that supports the flow and processing of information. Infrastructure companies play a significant part in evolving the Internet, both in terms of...