NETWORK PROTOCOLS

1. VLAN Trunking Protocol (VTP)

VTP is a Cisco-proprietary protocol which is available on Cisco Catalyst series network devices
(Cisco). It should be used to distribute VLAN information to connected switches found within a
domain (Jatariya).

Apart from this, VTP will significantly aid in the network administration since it will maintain the
global configuration information for the network in vlan.dat files rather than running-config or
startup-config files (Cisco).

2. Dynamic Trunking Protocol (DTP)

DTP should be used to manage negotiation of trunking links between two VLAN switches, and it
is also a Cisco-proprietary protocol. DTP is beneficial to the network since supports many
trunking modes and will increase the traffic on the trunked links (Sharma).

3. Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)

SNMP should be used for monitoring and graphing the performances of the devices on the
network (Cisco). SNMP defines three unique components which are critical to the network in
the following ways:

 SNMP agent: This will maintain information about how the elements within the
network operate in a real-time manner
 SNMP manager: The manager will act as a centralized system to monitor the traffic
seen by the agents while providing a mechanism for controlling the agents.
 Management Information Base (MIB): This will store information related to the
management of the network which will be accessible and modifiable by both the SNMP
agent and manager.

4. Cisco Discovery Protocol

This protocol should be used to facilitate management of the Cisco devices on the network
since it acts by discovering and determining how the devices are configured and allowing other
systems using different protocols on the same network layer to ‘learn’ about each other (Cisco).