Computer Networks Lab

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Students will learn how to put "principles into practice" in the Computer Networks Lab. The lab is a miniature version of the Internet. The available equipment is sufficient to emulate many traffic scenarios found on the real Internet and to teach TCP/IP protocols and data communication to students, and to give them hands-on experience on networking.  

The lab experiments cover some of the important Internet protocols, including IP, ARP, ICMP, UDP, TCP, routing protocols (RIP, OSPF, BGP), and application-level protocols (DNS, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3). In addition to an in-depth study of the Internet protocols in real network settings, you will gain hands-on experience working on networking equipment and acquire useful networking skills. By putting computer networking into practice, this lab aims to teach how network protocols work and how networked systems interact.

There are 12 lab experiments. Each lab consists of a prelab, lab session, and a postlab report. Prelab will be individual work. The lab exercises and postlab reports will be completed in groups of 2. The lab exercises are completed without supervision and require on the average 2 hours of work.

Tentative Lab Schedule
 

W Dt Lectures LABs
1 19/02 Intro Lab 0: Introduction to the Lab, Networking Tools and Linux: Objectives of the Lab Experiments, Experiments, Lab Activities, Procedures and Grading, Lab Hardware and Software, Linux

Wireshark Lab:
Getting Started

CISCO Packet Tracer:
Simulation and visualization program designed for networking novices.
Start to go over networking tutorials of this simulation program as you learn new topics in class and also study in advance during the semester. It is an exiting and very useful tool to learn networking concepts, network devices and their configurations at home without going to a real lab environment.
2 26/02 App.

 

This is the tentative lab schedule and some possible experiments, the students should follow the Lab TA's web page weekly for the final lab program.

Lab 1:TCP/UDP Socket Programming
Example Programs Introduction to TCP/UDP socket programming and understanding reliable connection-oriented and unreliable connectionless services provided by the transport layer protocols, TCP and UDP respectively. Compiling, running, and modifying simple TCP/UDP Java client/server applications on a computer and then porting the same client/server applications to 2 (one server/one client) and 3 (one server, 2 clients) computers.

Lab
Assignment 1:
Getting Started to Network Programming using Java TCP/UDP Sockets

3 05/03   Lab 2: DNS and HTTP Wireshark Labs from the main text book
4 12/03   Lab 3: E-Mail Protocols: Analysis of SMTP and POP3 Protocols using Wireshark

Some Possible Socket Programming Labs:
- Web Server
- Mail Client
5 19/03 Transport Lab 4: UDP Wireshark Lab
6 26/03   Lab 5: TCP Wireshark Lab
7 02/04 Midterm Problem Solving for Midterm Exam
8 09/04 Network Lab 6: IP Wireshark Lab  and ICMP Wireshark Lab
9 16/04   Lab 7: NAT Wireshark Lab
10 22/04   Lab 8: Routing Protocols
11 30/04 Data Link
LANs
Lab 9: Ethernet-ARP Wireshark Lab
12 07/05    Lab 10: 802.11 Wireshark Lab
13 14/05   Lab 11:  
14 21/05   Lab Final

Lab Materials and References

bullet TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview, IBM Redbook, 2006. (available over the Net)
bulletProtocol details, RFCs, etc: www.networksorcery.com, Full Standard RFCs, All RFCs nb gf vrfsx
bullet Linux Home Networking

 

 

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This site was last updated 03/17/13