Network Design Principles

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Design principles are widely applicable laws, guidelines, biases and considerations that designers use to guide their decision-making process. Engineers use some of these principles to design products that meet the users’ requirements.

In a series of posts, I describe briefly one design principle that is applicable to the design of data networks. Many of the design principles are well-known in many disciplines (see Lidwell, William, et al. Universal Principles of Design. 2nd ed., Rockport, 2010.), others are more specific to network design.

Click on the links below to read about each principle.

  1. 80/20 Rule
  2. Consistency
  3. Cost-benefit
  4. Design by Committee
  5. Design Process
  6. Divide-and-Conquer
  7. Factor of Safety
  8. Flexibility-usability tradeoff
  9. Hierarchy of Needs
  10. KISS
  11. Modularity
  12. Patterns
  13. Redundancy
  14. Scalability